The Information Processor

We grow accustomed to the Dark, by Emily Dickenson

2010-08-27T11:59:00.002-05:00

We grow accustomed to the Dark --
When light is put away --
As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp
To witness her Goodbye --

A Moment -- We uncertain step
For newness of the night --
Then -- fit our Vision to the Dark --
And meet the Road -- erect --

And so of larger -- Darkness --
Those Evenings of the Brain --
When not a Moon disclose a sign --
Or Star -- come out -- within --

The Bravest -- grope a little --
And sometimes hit a Tree
Directly in the Forehead --
But as they learn to see --

Either the Darkness alters --
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight --
And Life steps almost straight.

Darkness by Lord Byron

2010-08-27T11:57:00.001-05:00

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chilled into a selfish prayer for light;
And they did live by watchfires—and the thrones,
The palaces of crowned kings—the huts,
The habitations of all things which dwell,
Were burnt for beacons; cities were consumed,
And men were gathered round their blazing homes
To look once more into each other's face;
Happy were those which dwelt within the eye
Of the volcanoes, and their mountain-torch;
A fearful hope was all the world contained;
Forests were set on fire—but hour by hour
They fell and faded—and the crackling trunks
Extinguished with a crash—and all was black.
The brows of men by the despairing light
Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits
The flashes fell upon them: some lay down
And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest
Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smiled;
And others hurried to and fro, and fed
Their funeral piles with fuel, and looked up
With mad disquietude on the dull sky,
The pall of a past world; and then again
With curses cast them down upon the dust,
And gnashed their teeth and howled; the wild birds shrieked,
And, terrified, did flutter on the ground,
And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes
Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawled
And twined themselves among the multitude,
Hissing, but stingless—they were slain for food;
And War, which for a moment was no more,
Did glut himself again;—a meal was bought
With blood, and each sate sullenly apart
Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;
All earth was but one thought—and that was death,
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang
Of famine fed upon all entrails—men
Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;
The meagre by the meagre were devoured,
Even dogs assailed their masters, all save one,
And he was faithful to a corse, and kept
The birds and beasts and famished men at bay,
Till hunger clung them, or the drooping dead
Lured their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,
But with a piteous and perpetual moan,
And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand
Which answered not with a caress—he died.
The crowd was famished by degrees; but two
Of an enormous city did survive,
And they were enemies: they met beside
The dying embers of an altar-place
Where had been heaped a mass of holy things
For an unholy usage: they raked up,
And shivering scraped with their cold skeleton hands
The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath
Blew for a little life, and made a flame
Which was a mockery; then they lifted up
Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld
Each other's aspects—saw, and shrieked, and died—
Even of their mutual hideousness they died,
Unknowing who he was upon whose brow
Famine had written Fiend. The world was void,
The populous and the powerful was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—
A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay.
The rivers, lakes, and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirred within their silent depths;
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,
And their masts fell down piecemeal; as they dropped
They slept on the abyss without a surge—
The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The Moon, their mistress, had expired before;
The winds were withered in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perished! Darkness had no need
Of aid from them—She was the Universe!

Words and Moods in Late August

2010-08-27T11:40:00.003-05:00

I spit into the face of Time
That has transfigured me.
_______

I have nothing but the embittered sun;

_______

Time drops in decay,
Like a candle burnt out,
And the mountains and the woods
Have their day, have their day;

_______

But O, in a minute she changed--
O do not love too long,
Or you will grow out of fashion
Like an old song.

_______

I heard the old, old men say,
'Everything alters,
And one by one we drop away.'

_______

You are safer in the tomb.

_______

So people and things don't pair any more
With what they used to pair with before.

Sunshine in a Bag

2010-08-27T11:26:00.001-05:00

THE HUMAN ABSTRACT -- William Blake

[...]

He sits down with holy fears,
And waters the ground with tears;
Then Humility takes its root
Underneath his foot.

Soon spreads the dismal shade
Of Mystery over his head,
And the caterpillar and fly
Feed on the Mystery.

And it bears the fruit of Deceit,
Ruddy and sweet to eat,
And the raven his nest has made
In its thickest shade.

The gods of the earth and sea
Sought through nature to find this tree,
But their search was all in vain:
There grows one in the human Brain.

Selfish, Vain, Eternal Bane

2010-08-27T11:22:00.002-05:00

LOVE'S SECRET

by: William Blake (1757-1827)

NEVER seek to tell thy love,
Love that never told can be;
For the gentle wind doth move
Silently, invisibly.

I told my love, I told my love,
I told her all my heart,
Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears.
Ah! she did depart!

Soon after she was gone from me,
A traveller came by,
Silently, invisibly:
He took her with a sigh.

Quinean Revision and the Prototype Paradigm

2010-08-03T15:31:00.002-05:00

Here.

Nick Carraway

2010-06-07T16:22:00.000-05:00

I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. . . .

I shook hands with him; it seemed silly not to, for I felt suddenly as though I were talking to a child. Then he went into the jewelry store to buy a pearl necklace—or perhaps only a pair of cuff buttons—rid of my provincial squeamishness forever.

Gatsby’s house was still empty when I left—the grass on his lawn had grown as long as mine. One of the taxi drivers in the village never took a fare past the entrance gate without stopping for a minute and pointing inside; perhaps it was he who drove Daisy and Gatsby over to East Egg the night of the accident, and perhaps he had made a story about it all his own. I didn’t want to hear it and I avoided him when I got off the train.

I spent my Saturday nights in New York because those gleaming, dazzling parties of his were with me so vividly that I could still hear the music and the laughter, faint and incessant, from his garden, and the cars going up and down his drive. One night I did hear a material car there, and saw its lights stop at his front steps. But I didn’t investigate. Probably it was some final guest who had been away at the ends of the earth and didn’t know that the party was over.

On the last night, with my trunk packed and my car sold to the grocer, I went over and looked at that huge incoherent failure of a house once more. On the white steps an obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight, and I erased it, drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone. Then I wandered down to the beach and sprawled out on the sand.

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

The Science of Mating

2010-02-10T17:07:00.000-05:00

The Evolutionary Psychology of Human Mate Choice: How Ecology, Genes, Fertility, and Fashion Influence Mating Behavior, here.

Randomnesses

2010-02-04T17:09:00.002-05:00

Hamartini -- the tragic flaw of alcoholism.

Monkish and miserable sophistry -- Milton's judgment of University

To justify my ability with creation.

"But you're a woman. Your bark is your bite."

I was, like Milton, "church-outed by the prelates."

As Gibbon says in his Autobiography, every man has two educations: that which he receives from his teachers and that which he owes to himself.

"But every man who rises above the common level has received two educations: the first from his teachers; the second, more personal and more important, from himself.".."happy for my eyes and my health, that my temperate ardour has never been seduced to trespass on the hours of the night."

A period of self-centered isolation.

Few men have mastered more things worth mastering -- best proof: his poems with their "undercurrent of perpetual allusion."

ohne Hast, aber ohne Rast -- without haste, but without rest -- Goethe's motto, Carlyle had it inscribed on the seal given to Goethe on the latter's b-day.

coign of seclusion -- protected corner in which to think; coign of vantage -- favorable position for observation.

the careless hedonism of the cavalier world vs. the deepening austerity of puritanism.

Monody -- an ode sung by a single person; meed -- deserved share or reward ("meed of some melodious tear", Lycidas); farrago -- confused mixture (farrago of scurrilities); lacrimae rerum -- tears for things; amanuensis -- literary assistant, one who takes dictation;

"with denial vain, and coy excuse", fame -- that last infirmity of the noble mind; Lycidas; Dryden complained that Milton saw nature through the spectacles of books; Shakespeare -- "My nature is subdued to what it works in, like the dyer's hand"; to go sore against the grain; Milton -- "...proud Imprimaturs not to be obtained without the shallow surview, but not shallow hand of some mercenary, narrow-souled, and illiterate chaplain"; who can advise may speak;

Let us remain in hell!
Since there is more content
To live in liberty, tho' all condemn'd,
Than, as his vassals, blest.

Why do I tarry? My innerds are not yet ripe. I have not yet completed to my mind the full circle of my private studies.

"That by labor and intense study, joined with the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave something so written to aftertimes, as they should not willingly let it die." -- Milton

'Tis a toilsome vanity to make verbal curiosities the end.

What recks it them? What need they? They are sped; And when they list, their lean and flashy songs grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw; the hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, but swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw, rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread; besides what the grim wolf with privy paw daily devours apace, and nothing said.

For so to interpose a little ease, let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise.

Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high; tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.

Be not, ye poets, mere idle singers of an empty day!

Gaming, drinking, fencing, swearing, quarreling, and drabbing (whoring) are companions noted and most known in youth and liberty. I, for one, am open to incontinency.

And thus do we of wisdom and of reach, with windlasses and with assays of bias, by indirections find directions out. Observe his inclination in yourself, and let him ply his music.

It is proper in our age to cast beyond ourselves in our opinions, as it is common for the younger sort to lack discretion.

Diagram of Intelligent Design Theories

2010-01-13T08:50:00.004-05:00

Y-axis denotes how much of a theory is literalized Ancient Text, plus how much control God has within the universe. X-axis denotes a theory's 'exclusivity of reliance' on Science, plus the degree to which materialism is assumed at the start.

Eusociality: Origin and Consequences

2010-01-12T15:21:00.000-05:00

Full text here. Abstract:

In this new assessment of the empirical evidence, an alternative to the standard model is proposed: group selection is the strong binding force in eusocial evolution; individual selection, the strong dissolutive force; and kin selection (narrowly defined), either a weak binding or weak dissolutive force, according to circumstance. Close kinship may be more a consequence of eusociality than a factor promoting its origin. A point of no return to the solitary state exists, as a rule when workers become anatomically differentiated. Eusociality has been rare in evolution, evidently due to the scarcity of environmental pressures adequate to tip the balance among countervailing forces in favor of group selection. Eusociality in ants and termites in the irreversible stage is the key to their ecological dominance and has (at least in ants) shaped some features of internal phylogeny. Their colonies are consistently superior to solitary and preeusocial competitors, due to the altruistic behavior among nestmates and their ability to organize coordinated action by pheromonal communication.

Emergence of Superorganism Through Intergroup Competition

2010-01-12T15:18:00.002-05:00

Full text here. Abstract:

Surveys of insect societies have revealed four key, recurring organizational trends: (i) The most elaborated cooperation occurs in groups of relatives. (ii) Cooperation is typically more elaborate in species with large colony sizes than in species with small colony sizes, the latter exhibiting greater internal reproductive conflict and lesser morphological and behavioral specialization. (iii) Within a species, per capita brood output typically declines as colony size increases. (iv). The ecological factors of resource patchiness and intergroup competition are associated with the most elaborated cooperation. Predictions of all four patterns emerge elegantly from a game-theoretic model in which within-group tug-of-wars are nested within a between-group tug-of-war. In this individual selection model, individuals are faced with the problem of how to partition their energy between investment in intercolony competition versus investment in intracolony competition, i.e., internal tugs-of-war over shares of the resources gained through intergroup competition. An individual's evolutionarily stable investment in between-group competition (i.e., within-group cooperation) versus within-group competition is shown to increase as within-group relatedness increases, to decrease as group size increases (for a fixed number of competing groups), to increase as the number of competing groups in a patch increases, and to decrease as between-group relatedness increases. Moreover, if increasing patch richness increases both the number of individuals within a group and the number of competing groups, greater overall cooperation within larger groups will be observed. The model presents a simple way of determining quantitatively how intergroup conflict will propel a society forward along a “superorganism continuum.”

Dostoevsky, A Writer's Diary

2010-01-12T12:48:00.002-05:00

Spiritualism. Something about Devils. The Extraordinary Cleverness of Devils, If Only These Are Devils.

What would happen to people then, I ask? Oh, of course, everyone would be in raptures at first. People would embrace one another in ecstasy; they would rush off to study these revelations (and that would take time); they would suddenly feel themselves overcome by happiness and up to their necks in material blessings; perhaps they would walk or fly through the air, covering immense distances ten times faster than they now do by railway; they would extract fabulous harvests from the earth, create new organisms through chemistry; and there would be beef enough to supply three pounds per person, just as our Russian socialists dream--in short, eat, drink, and be merry. "And now," all the lovers of humanity would cry, "now that human needs are taken care of, now we will reveal our true potential! There are no more material deprivations, no more corrupting environment, once the source of all flaws; now humans will become beautiful and righteous! There is no more ceaseless labor to try to feed oneself, and now everyone will occupy himself with sublime, profound thoughts and with universal concerns. Now, only now, has life in the higher sense begun!" And what clever and good people, perhaps, would give voice to such words, and the novelty of it all might attract still others until, at last, they would raise their voices in common hymn: "Who can be likened unto this beast? Praise be to him who has brought fire down from the heavens!"

But such rapturous outpourings would scarcely be enough for even one generation! People would suddenly see that they had no more life left, that they had no freedom of spirit, no will, no personality, that someone had stolen all this from them; they would see that their human image had disappeared and that the brutish image of a slave had emerged, the image of an animal, with the single difference that a beast does not realize that it is a beast, but a human would realize that he had become a beast. And humanity would begin to decay; people would be covered in sores and begin to bite their tongues in torment, seeing that their lives had been taken away for the sake of bread, for "stones turned into bread." People would realize that there is no happiness in inactivity, that the mind which does not labor will wither, that it is not possible to love one's neighbor without sacrificing something to him of own's own labor, that it is vile to live at the expense of another, and that happiness lies not in happiness but only in the attempt to achieve it. People would be overcome by boredom and the sickness of the heart: everything has been done and there is nothing more to do; everything has become known and there is nothing more to discover. There would be crowds of people seeking to end their lives, but not as they do now, in some obscure corner; masses of people would gather, seizing one another's hands, and suddenly destroy themselves by the thousands through some new method that they discovered along with all their other discoveries. And then, perhaps, those who remained would cry out to God: "Thou art right, O Lord: man does not live by bread alone!" Then they would rise up against the devils and abandon witchery....Oh, never would God send down such torments on humanity! And the kingdom of the devils would collapse! No, the devils won't make such a grave political error. They are sophisticated politicians and move toward their goal by a most subtle and logical route (I repeat: that is, if devils indeed do exist!).

The fundamental principle of their kingdom is discord; that is, they want to found it on discord. Why do they specifically need discord here? Why, it's obvious: just remember that discord itself is a dreadful force; discord, after a long period of strife, drives people to folly; it dulls and distorts their reason and their feelings. In discord he who gives offense, once he realizes what he has done, does not go to be reconciled with the one he has offended, but says: "I offended him, and so I must take revenge on him." But the main thing is that the devils have the most thorough knowledge of the history of the human race and particularly remember all those things on which discord has been based. They know, for instance, that if in Europe sects exist that have broken away from Catholicism and continue up to now as religions, then this is only because blood was spilled because of them at one time. Should Catholicism, for example, come to an end, then all the Protestant sects would inevitably collapse as well: what would be let for them to protest against? Even now they are almost inclined to move into some sort of "humanism," or even simply to atheism, and people have remarked on that for some time now. And if these sects still continue to cling to life as religions, then it is because they still continue to protest. They protested even last year, and what a protest it was! -- they took on the pope himself.

Oh, of course in the final analysis the influence of the devils will prevail and they will crush humanity like a fly with their "stones turned into bread." That is their principal goal, but they will undertake to fulfill it only after having first ensured that their future kingdom will be safe from human rebellion and so guarantee its longevity. But how can humans be subdued? Of course: divide et impera (divide the enemy and you will conquer him). And for this they need discord. On the other hand, people will get tired of the stones turned into bread, and so something must be found for them to do so they won't get bored. And isn't discord a fine occupation for human beings!

And what if the devils, having prepared the ground and planted sufficient discord, suddenly want to broaden the sphere of their activities and turn to something genuine and serious? They're an unpredictable lot with a strong sense of irony and could do something of that sort. For instance, what if they suddenly burst into the midst of the People, along with literacy, say? And our People are so defenseless, so given to ignorance and debauchery, and there are so few who can guide them in this sense, it seems! The People might put their faith in these new phenomena with a passion. Then how their spiritual development would be delayed! What damage might be done, and for what a period of time! What an idolatrous worship of materialism, and what discord; discord a hundred, a thousand times worse than before; and this is exactly what the devils need. And discord certainly will ensue, especially of spiritualism manages to provoke restrictions and persecution (and persecution would inevitably follow from the rest of the People who do not believe in spiritualism). Then it would spread in an instant, like burning kerosene, and set everything ablaze.

I have been most definitely joking and having fun from the first word to the last; but this is what I would like to express in conclusion: if we regard spiritualism as something that bears within it some sort of new religion (and almost all, even the most sober-minded among the spiritualists, are inclined to share even a little of that view), then something of what I have said above might be taken seriously. And therefore, may God grant speedy success to the free study of the question from both sides. This alone will help to eradicate quickly the nasty spirit that is spreading about, and will, perhaps, enrich science by some new discovery. But to shout at one another, to heap scorn on one another and ostracize one another for spiritualism, means, in my view, only to strengthen and disseminate the idea of spiritualism in its worst sense. This is the beginning of intolerance and persecution. That's just what the devils want!

The Shield of Achilles, Auden

2010-01-06T14:07:00.002-05:00

That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.

The Aleph

2009-12-21T15:33:00.001-05:00

By Jorge Luis Borges. Excerpt:

I arrive now at the ineffable core of my story. And here begins my despair as a writer. All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a shared past. How, then, can I translate into words the limitless Aleph, which my floundering mind can scarcely encompass? Mystics, faced with the same problem, fall back on symbols: to signify the godhead, one Persian speaks of a bird that somehow is all birds; Alanus de Insulis, of a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere; Ezekiel, of a four-faced angel who at one and the same time moves east and west, north and south. (Not in vain do I recall these inconceivable analogies; they bear some relation to the Aleph.) Perhaps the gods might grant me a similar metaphor, but then this account would become contaminated by literature, by fiction. Really, what I want to do is impossible, for any listing of an endless series is doomed to be infinitesimal. In that single gigantic instant I saw millions of acts both delightful and awful; not one of them occupied the same point in space, without overlapping or transparency. What my eyes beheld was simultaneous, but what I shall now write down will be successive, because language is successive. Nonetheless, I'll try to recollect what I can.

On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph's diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror's face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I'd seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand; I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast; I saw a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a summer house in Adrogué and a copy of the first English translation of Pliny -- Philemon Holland's -- and all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight); I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal; I saw my empty bedroom; I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out picture postcards; I saw in a showcase in Mirzapur a pack of Spanish playing cards; I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet; I saw a Persian astrolabe; I saw in the drawer of a writing table (and the handwriting made me tremble) unbelievable, obscene, detailed letters, which Beatriz had written to Carlos Argentino; I saw a monument I worshipped in the Chacarita cemetery; I saw the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon -- the unimaginable universe.

I felt infinite wonder, infinite pity.

"Feeling pretty cockeyed, are you, after so much spying into places where you have no business?" said a hated and jovial voice. "Even if you were to rack your brains, you couldn't pay me back in a hundred years for this revelation. One hell of an observatory, eh, Borges?"

Carlos Argentino's feet were planted on the topmost step. In the sudden dim light, I managed to pick myself up and utter, "One hell of a -- yes, one hell of a."

The matter-of-factness of my voice surprised me. Anxiously, Carlos Argentino went on.

"Did you see everything -- really clear, in colours?"

At that moment I found my revenge. Kindly, openly pitying him, distraught, evasive, I thanked Carlos Argentino Daneri for the hospitality of his cellar and urged him to make the most of the demolition to get away from the pernicious metropolis, which spares no one -- believe me, I told him, no one! Quietly and forcefully, I refused to discuss the Aleph. On saying goodbye, I embraced him and repeated that the country, that fresh air and quiet were the great physicians.

Out on the street, going down the stairways inside Constitution Station, riding the subway, every one of the faces seemed familiar to me. I was afraid that not a single thing on earth would ever again surprise me; I was afraid I would never again be free of all I had seen. Happily, after a few sleepless nights, I was visited once more by oblivion.

Postscript of March first, 1943 -- Some six months after the pulling down of a certain building on Garay Street, Procrustes & Co., the publishers, not put off by the considerable length of Daneri's poem, brought out a selection of its "Argentine sections". It is redundant now to repeat what happened. Carlos Argentino Daneri won the Second National Prize for Literature. ["I received your pained congratulations," he wrote me. "You rage, my poor friend, with envy, but you must confess -- even if it chokes you! -- that this time I have crowned my cap with the reddest of feathers; my turban with the most caliph of rubies."] First Prize went to Dr. Aita; Third Prize, to Dr. Mario Bonfanti. Unbelievably, my own book The Sharper's Cards did not get a single vote. Once again dullness and envy had their triumph! It's been some time now that I've been trying to see Daneri; the gossip is that a second selection of the poem is about to be published. His felicitous pen (no longer cluttered by the Aleph) has now set itself the task of writing an epic on our national hero, General San Martín.

I want to add two final observations: one, on the nature of the Aleph; the other, on its name. As is well known, the Aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Its use for the strange sphere in my story may not be accidental. For the Kabbala, the letter stands for the En Soph, the pure and boundless godhead; it is also said that it takes the shape of a man pointing to both heaven and earth, in order to show that the lower world is the map and mirror of the higher; for Cantor's Mengenlehre, it is the symbol of transfinite numbers, of which any part is as great as the whole. I would like to know whether Carlos Argentino chose that name or whether he read it -- applied to another point where all points converge - - in one of the numberless texts that the Aleph in his cellar revealed to him. Incredible as it may seem, I believe that the Aleph of Garay Street was a false Aleph.

Here are my reasons. Around 1867, Captain Burton held the post of British Consul in Brazil. In July, 1942, Pedro Henríquez Ureña came across a manuscript of Burton's, in a library at Santos, dealing with the mirror which the Oriental world attributes to Iskander Zu al-Karnayn, or Alexander Bicornis of Macedonia. In its crystal the whole world was reflected. Burton mentions other similar devices -- the sevenfold cup of Kai Kosru; the mirror that Tariq ibn-Ziyad found in a tower (Thousand and One Nights, 272); the mirror that Lucian of Samosata examined on the moon (True History, I, 26); the mirrorlike spear that the first book of Capella's Satyricon attributes; Merlin's universal mirror, which was "round and hollow... and seem'd a world of glas" (The Faerie Queene, III, 2, 19) -- and adds this curious statement: "But the aforesaid objects (besides the disadvantage of not existing) are mere optical instruments. The Faithful who gather at the mosque of Amr, in Cairo, are acquainted with the fact that the entire universe lies inside one of the stone pillars that ring its central court... No one, of course, can actually see it, but those who lay an ear against the surface tell that after some short while they perceive its busy hum... The mosque dates from the seventh century; the pillars come from other temples of pre-Islamic religions, since, as ibn-Khaldun has written: 'In nations founded by nomads, the aid of foreigners is essential in all concerning masonry.'"

Does this Aleph exist in the heart of a stone? Did I see it there in the cellar when I saw all things, and have I now forgotten it? Our minds are porous and forgetfulness seeps in; I myself am distorting and losing, under the wearing away of the years, the face of Beatriz.

El Aleph, 1945. Translation by Norman Thomas Di Giovanni in collaboration with the author.

Morrison Swift

2009-10-15T17:15:00.003-05:00

Quotes from Human Submission.

If we eliminate consciousness from the universe I do not know of what consequence its existence is, and if consciousness is the greatest thing, the way this universe uses every conscious being is our test of the universe.

Quoting F.H. Hedge: "To the question, then, how evil consists with the goodness of God? I answer flatly, it does not consist with the goodness of God. Either there is no God, such as we figure him, or there is no evil. Pain and suffering in abundance, but no evil. For only that is really and absolutely evil which is . . . evil in its issue, evil for evermore. Nothing in God's universe answers to that condition."

Who knows anything about good or evil for evermore? Who is familiar with 'God's universe' beyond the immoral medley of it here? Is there then no evil? Let us try to conceive how men who are neither philosophers nor proprietors of the planet would answer this question.

On the llth of October, 1904, the press contained some curious information from Cleveland, Ohio:

"After murdering his two children, John, aged three, and Emma, aged four, Bohunil Schnepp, a Bohemian laborer, aged forty-one, made an unsuccessful attempt on his own, life at the grave of his wife in Woodland Cemetery here. He is now in a local hospital, where the doctors say he will recover. Schnepp has vainly searched for weeks for employment, and, becoming discouraged over the prospect of not being able to provide a home for himself and his two motherless babies, he yesterday decided to blot out the entire family.

" He took the two children into the basement of his boarding house, where, after tying handkerchiefs tightly over their mouths so that they could make no outcry, he fired a shot from an old revolver into each of their heads. The bullets failing to kill instantly, he seized an old hammer which was lying nearby and struck the children on the skull behind the temple. The two bodies were then placed side by side on the floor, while the frantic father went to the cemetery where the body of his wife was buried. There, with the pistol he had used on his babies, he fired a shot into his head.

" He was picked up unconscious and hurried to the hospital, where examination revealed the fact that the bullet had missed the brain and that he would recover. In the meantime the bodies of his unfortunate victims had been found, Emma being dead and John dyiug within half an hour. Schnepp left a letter in which he stated that he ' had nothing left to do' but kill himself; that he now ' had a job iu hell as a fireman ' and asked that he and the children be buried in the same grave."

This phenomenon happened in a world whose God is Love. In New York an old man starved to death : "Two shoemakers, Michael and Jacob Buthren, both more than 70 years old, have been living in a rear tenement in Gates Avenue, Brooklyn. To-day the police were notified by neighbors that something was wrong with the old men. They visited the house and found Michael dead and his brother Jacob lying half conscious and barely alive by his side. Both were victims of starvation. It is impossible to say how long they had been without food, but it must have been several days."

A tailor in Philadelphia paid his debts and took poison, writing, " The other world may be just as bad." Max Horn, a tailor, fearing that he would become blind and so be thrown out of work committed suicide yesterday, at 920 South Street, by drinking carbolic acid. He had been troubled with weak eyes for some time, and had been unable to work at his trade. This note addressed to the man with whom he lived, was found in the suicide's room:

" ' Friend Witkin—I leave you 30 cents for two suppers, Sunday and Monday, that belongs to you. Excuse me, friends, for the trouble, but I couldn't help myself. I hope you will excuse me. I want you to sell all my clothes and buy me new ones for the grave. I wish you good-by and good luck from me. Yours truly, Horn.

" ' The world aint more for me. The other world may be just as bad. Max Horn.' "

The records of many more such cases lie before me ; an encyclopedia might easily be filled with their kind. These few I cite as an interpretation of the universe. " We are aware of the presence of God in His world," says a writer in a recent English Review. " The Absolute is the richer for every discord, and for all diversity which it embraces," says F. H. Bradley {Appearance and Reality, 204). He means that these slain men make the universe richer, and that is Philosophy.

This is a beautiful summary of that ignoble resignation and acceptance which is all that religion can offer us against the blows of nature. Coerce your mind and subdue your insight, ignore realities and inwardly assert that the storms of evil beating down man are mysterious expressions of Divine Love.

The illuminations of religion and of philosophy are then identical, and the secret of both is Faith. Devoutly believe that the universe is Divine Love and a Perfect Whole. And now let us, as before we did with religion, apply the doctrine of philosophy to facts. When the obscure Cleveland workman, having vainly searched through weeks for employment, took his two children into the basement of his boarding house and tying handkerchiefs over their mouths fired a shot from an old revolver into each of their heads, and, failing to kill them, hammered their skulls in beneath the temple, we had ' a fragmentary glimpse of the Absolute life,' ' a revelation of the unity of the perfect Whole.' We had, I think, on the contrary a perfectly clear glimpse of what any one not besotted by the concepts of philosophy would call Absolute Imperfection, and of a universe in which the attributes of hate and hell were in cruel supremacy. And neither philosophy nor religion will much longer avail with intellectual charlatanry and sophistries to restrain mankind from so reasoning and seeing. When it does so, a change in its principles of action like that of the passage from an old to a new universe will transpire.

Ethics follows at the tail of philosophy and religion. "The joys of a good conscience," says Wundt, "far excelling all other sources of happiness, are so great that the really moral man is entirely satisfied with the position assigned him by Fate : he would not change places with any one." *

Patiently bringing our facts to bear upon this quaint academic thinker's fiction, the working man who, crazed by starving and seeing his boy and girl whom he could not feed pining and dying before his eyes, with no commisseration from God or man or moralist, crushed out their brains, would have been ' entirely satisfied with the position assigned him by Fate,' nor would he have changed places with anyone; for tip to the time when the frenzy seized him he must surely have had a good conscience, since for weeks he had zealously pursued the mocking phantasies of employment and honest food. Thus the ethical writer with the mysteries of his science can reduce the utmost misery that a human being can know to a joy far excelling all others; he can make the most horrible fate conceivable to man identical with his highest bliss. But he does more : he demonstrates that ethics is an archaic exercise of modern school-masters hundreds of years in arrears, that its message to the present and to the future is dead.

' Thou shalt not steal, neither shalt thou covet,' are suitable precepts in a state of equality, but in a social mechanism framed as Rome was for the spoliation of the many, they are advices to the many to meanly fall down and be pillaged.

William James, Pragmatism

2009-10-15T16:00:00.005-05:00

Pragmatism, Lecture One excerpts.

In the preface to that admirable collection of essays of his called 'Heretics,' Mr. Chesterton writes these words: "There are some people—and I am one of them—who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe."

There is, it must be confessed, a curious fascination in hearing deep things talked about, even tho neither we nor the disputants understand them. We get the problematic thrill, we feel the presence of the vastness. Let a controversy begin in a smoking-room anywhere, about free-will or God's omniscience, or good and evil, and see how everyone in the place pricks up his ears.

The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments. Undignified as such a treatment may seem to some of my colleagues, I shall have to take account of this clash and explain a good many of the divergencies of philosophers by it. Of whatever temperament a professional philosopher is, he tries when philosophizing to sink the fact of his temperament. Temperament is no conventionally recognized reason, so he urges impersonal reasons only for his conclusions. Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective premises.

But the one thing that has COUNTED so far in philosophy is that a man should see things, see them straight in his own peculiar way, and be dissatisfied with any opposite way of seeing them. There is no reason to suppose that this strong temperamental vision is from now onward to count no longer in the history of man's beliefs.

The tough think of the tender as sentimentalists and soft-heads. The tender feel the tough to be unrefined, callous, or brutal. Their mutual reaction is very much like that that takes place when Bostonian tourists mingle with a population like that of Cripple Creek. Each type believes the other to be inferior to itself; but disdain in the one case is mingled with amusement, in the other it has a dash of fear.

And now I come to the first positively important point which I wish to make. Never were as many men of a decidedly empiricist proclivity in existence as there are at the present day. Our children, one may say, are almost born scientific.

Now what kinds of philosophy do you find actually offered to meet your need? You find an empirical philosophy that is not religious enough, and a religious philosophy that is not empirical enough for your purpose. If you look to the quarter where facts are most considered you find the whole tough-minded program in operation, and the 'conflict between science and religion' in full blast. Either it is that Rocky Mountain tough of a Haeckel with his materialistic monism, his ether-god and his jest at your God as a 'gaseous vertebrate'; or it is Spencer treating the world's history as a redistribution of matter and motion solely, and bowing religion politely out at the front door.

Man is no law-giver to nature, he is an absorber. She it is who stands firm; he it is who must accommodate himself. Let him record truth, inhuman tho it be, and submit to it! The romantic spontaneity and courage are gone, the vision is materialistic and depressing. Ideals appear as inert by- products of physiology; what is higher is explained by what is lower and treated forever as a case of 'nothing but'—nothing but something else of a quite inferior sort. You get, in short, a materialistic universe, in which only the tough-minded find themselves congenially at home.

theism remains, however. It is the lineal descendant, through one stage of concession after another, of the dogmatic scholastic theism still taught rigorously in the seminaries of the catholic church. For a long time it used to be called among us the philosophy of the Scottish school. It is what I meant by the philosophy that has the air of fighting a slow retreat. Between the encroachments of the hegelians and other philosophers of the 'Absolute,' on the one hand, and those of the scientific evolutionists and agnostics, on the other, the men that give us this kind of a philosophy, James Martineau, Professor Bowne, Professor Ladd and others, must feel themselves rather tightly squeezed. Fair-minded and candid as you like, this philosophy is not radical in temper. It is eclectic, a thing of compromises, that seeks a modus vivendi above all things. It accepts the facts of darwinism, the facts of cerebral physiology, but it does nothing active or enthusiastic with them. It lacks the victorious and aggressive note. It lacks prestige in consequence; whereas absolutism has a certain prestige due to the more radical style of it.

The more absolutistic philosophers dwell on so high a level of abstraction that they never even try to come down. The absolute mind which they offer us, the mind that makes our universe by thinking it, might, for aught they show us to the contrary, have made any one of a million other universes just as well as this. You can deduce no single actual particular from the notion of it. It is compatible with any state of things whatever being true here below. And the theistic God is almost as sterile a principle. You have to go to the world which he has created to get any inkling of his actual character: he is the kind of god that has once for all made that kind of a world. The God of the theistic writers lives on as purely abstract heights as does the Absolute. Absolutism has a certain sweep and dash about it, while the usual theism is more insipid, but both are equally remote and vacuous. What you want is a philosophy that will not only exercise your powers of intellectual abstraction, but that will make some positive connexion with this actual world of finite human lives.

You want a system that will combine both things, the scientific loyalty to facts and willingness to take account of them, the spirit of adaptation and accommodation, in short, but also the old confidence in human values and the resultant spontaneity, whether of the religious or of the romantic type. And this is then your dilemma: you find the two parts of your quaesitum hopelessly separated. You find empiricism with inhumanism and irreligion; or else you find a rationalistic philosophy that indeed may call itself religious, but that keeps out of all definite touch with concrete facts and joys and sorrows.

n point of fact it is far less an account of this actual world than a clear addition built upon it, a classic sanctuary in which the rationalist fancy may take refuge from the intolerably confused and gothic character which mere facts present. It is no EXPLANATION of our concrete universe, it is another thing altogether, a substitute for it, a remedy, a way of escape.

Its temperament, if I may use the word temperament here, is utterly alien to the temperament of existence in the concrete. REFINEMENT is what characterizes our intellectualist philosophies. They exquisitely satisfy that craving for a refined object of contemplation which is so powerful an appetite of the mind. But I ask you in all seriousness to look abroad on this colossal universe of concrete facts, on their awful bewilderments, their surprises and cruelties, on the wildness which they show, and then to tell me whether 'refined' is the one inevitable descriptive adjective that springs to your lips.

Refinement has its place in things, true enough. But a philosophy that breathes out nothing but refinement will never satisfy the empiricist temper of mind. It will seem rather a monument of artificiality. So we find men of science preferring to turn their backs on metaphysics as on something altogether cloistered and spectral, and practical men shaking philosophy's dust off their feet and following the call of the wild.

Leibnitz continues elsewhere: "There is a kind of justice which aims neither at the amendment of the criminal, nor at furnishing an example to others, nor at the reparation of the injury. This justice is founded in pure fitness, which finds a certain satisfaction in the expiation of a wicked deed. The Socinians and Hobbes objected to this punitive justice, which is properly vindictive justice and which God has reserved for himself at many junctures. … It is always founded in the fitness of things, and satisfies not only the offended party, but all wise lookers-on, even as beautiful music or a fine piece of architecture satisfies a well-constituted mind.

[Morrison Isaac Swift's] anarchism goes a little farther than mine does, but I confess that I sympathize a good deal, and some of you, I know, will sympathize heartily with his dissatisfaction with the idealistic optimisms now in vogue. He begins his pamphlet on 'Human Submission' with a series of city reporter's items from newspapers (suicides, deaths from starvation and the like) as specimens of our civilized regime.

"This Cleveland workingman, killing his children and himself [another of the cited cases], is one of the elemental, stupendous facts of this modern world and of this universe. It cannot be glozed over or minimized away by all the treatises on God, and Love, and Being, helplessly existing in their haughty monumental vacuity. This is one of the simple irreducible elements of this world's life after millions of years of divine opportunity and twenty centuries of Christ. It is in the moral world like atoms or sub-atoms in the physical, primary, indestructible. And what it blazons to man is the … imposture of all philosophy which does not see in such events the consummate factor of conscious experience. These facts invincibly prove religion a nullity. Man will not give religion two thousand centuries or twenty centuries more to try itself and waste human time; its time is up, its probation is ended. Its own record ends it. Mankind has not sons and eternities to spare for trying out discredited systems…." [Footnote: Morrison I. Swift, Human Submission, Part Second, Philadelphia, Liberty Press, 1905, pp. 4- 10.]

Such is the reaction of an empiricist mind upon the rationalist bill of fare. It is an absolute 'No, I thank you.' "Religion," says Mr. Swift, "is like a sleep-walker to whom actual things are blank." And such, tho possibly less tensely charged with feeling, is the verdict of every seriously inquiring amateur in philosophy to-day who turns to the philosophy-professors for the wherewithal to satisfy the fulness of his nature's needs. Empiricist writers give him a materialism, rationalists give him something religious, but to that religion "actual things are blank." He becomes thus the judge of us philosophers. Tender or tough, he finds us wanting. None of us may treat his verdicts disdainfully, for after all, his is the typically perfect mind, the mind the sum of whose demands is greatest, the mind whose criticisms and dissatisfactions are fatal in the long run.

Not only Walt Whitman could write "who touches this book touches a man." The books of all the great philosophers are like so many men. Our sense of an essential personal flavor in each one of them, typical but indescribable, is the finest fruit of our own accomplished philosophic education. What the system pretends to be is a picture of the great universe of God. What it is—and oh so flagrantly!—is the revelation of how intensely odd the personal flavor of some fellow creature is. Once reduced to these terms (and all our philosophies get reduced to them in minds made critical by learning) our commerce with the systems reverts to the informal, to the instinctive human reaction of satisfaction or dislike.

LECTURE 2 Me: Pragmatism, Information and Distinguishability

Some years ago, being with a camping party in the mountains, I returned from a solitary ramble to find everyone engaged in a ferocious metaphysical dispute. The corpus of the dispute was a squirrel—a live squirrel supposed to be clinging to one side of a tree-trunk; while over against the tree's opposite side a human being was imagined to stand. This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel moves as fast in the opposite direction, and always keeps the tree between himself and the man, so that never a glimpse of him is caught. The resultant metaphysical problem now is this: DOES THE MAN GO ROUND THE SQUIRREL OR NOT? He goes round the tree, sure enough, and the squirrel is on the tree; but does he go round the squirrel? In the unlimited leisure of the wilderness, discussion had been worn threadbare. Everyone had taken sides, and was obstinate; and the numbers on both sides were even. Each side, when I appeared, therefore appealed to me to make it a majority. Mindful of the scholastic adage that whenever you meet a contradiction you must make a distinction, I immediately sought and found one, as follows: "Which party is right," I said, "depends on what you PRACTICALLY MEAN by 'going round' the squirrel. If you mean passing from the north of him to the east, then to the south, then to the west, and then to the north of him again, obviously the man does go round him, for he occupies these successive positions. But if on the contrary you mean being first in front of him, then on the right of him, then behind him, then on his left, and finally in front again, it is quite as obvious that the man fails to go round him, for by the compensating movements the squirrel makes, he keeps his belly turned towards the man all the time, and his back turned away. Make the distinction, and there is no occasion for any farther dispute. You are both right and both wrong according as you conceive the verb 'to go round' in one practical fashion or the other."

The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable. Is the world one or many?—fated or free?—material or spiritual?—here are notions either of which may or may not hold good of the world; and disputes over such notions are unending. The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle. Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show some practical difference that must follow from one side or the other's being right.

It was first introduced into philosophy by Mr. Charles Peirce in 1878. In an article entitled 'How to Make Our Ideas Clear,' in the 'Popular Science Monthly' for January of that year [Footnote: Translated in the Revue Philosophique for January, 1879 (vol. vii).] Mr. Peirce, after pointing out that our beliefs are really rules for action, said that to develope a thought's meaning, we need only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce: that conduct is for us its sole significance. And the tangible fact at the root of all our thought- distinctions, however subtle, is that there is no one of them so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice. To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, then, we need only consider what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve—what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare. Our conception of these effects, whether immediate or remote, is then for us the whole of our conception of the object, so far as that conception has positive significance at all.

It is astonishing to see how many philosophical disputes collapse into insignificance the moment you subject them to this simple test of tracing a concrete consequence. There can BE no difference any- where that doesn't MAKE a difference elsewhere—no difference in abstract truth that doesn't express itself in a difference in concrete fact and in conduct consequent upon that fact, imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere and somewhen. The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if this world- formula or that world-formula be the true one.

Me: To analyze beliefs according to the difference they make 'in concrete fact' keeps the door open for Christianity, by admitting the possibility of beneficent but false beliefs, beneficent socially, beneficent personally, or both. Myworld states are concrete facts, as are social events and phases.

[Back to James] A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once for all upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power. That means the empiricist temper regnant, and the rationalist temper sincerely given up. It means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality and the pretence of finality in truth.

It is a method only. But the general triumph of that method would mean an enormous change in what I called in my last lecture the 'temperament' of philosophy. Teachers of the ultra-rationalistic type would be frozen out, much as the courtier type is frozen out in republics, as the ultramontane type of priest is frozen out in protestant lands. Science and metaphysics would come much nearer together, would in fact work absolutely hand in hand.

Metaphysics has usually followed a very primitive kind of quest. You know how men have always hankered after unlawful magic, and you know what a great part, in magic, WORDS have always played. If you have his name, or the formula of incantation that binds him, you can control the spirit, genie, afrite, or whatever the power may be. Solomon knew the names of all the spirits, and having their names, he held them subject to his will. So the universe has always appeared to the natural mind as a kind of enigma, of which the key must be sought in the shape of some illuminating or power-bringing word or name. That word names the universe's PRINCIPLE, and to possess it is, after a fashion, to possess the universe itself. 'God,' 'Matter,' 'Reason,' 'the Absolute,' 'Energy,' are so many solving names. You can rest when you have them. You are at the end of your metaphysical quest.

But if you follow the pragmatic method, you cannot look on any such word as closing your quest. You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience. It appears less as a solution, then, than as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be CHANGED.

Such then would be the scope of pragmatism—first, a method; and second, a genetic theory of what is meant by truth.

Men who are strongly of the fact-loving temperament, you may remember me to have said, are liable to be kept at a distance by the small sympathy with facts which that philosophy from the present-day fashion of idealism offers them. It is far too intellectualistic. Old fashioned theism was bad enough, with its notion of God as an exalted monarch, made up of a lot of unintelligible or preposterous 'attributes'; but, so long as it held strongly by the argument from design, it kept some touch with concrete realities. Since, however, darwinism has once for all displaced design from the minds of the 'scientific,' theism has lost that foothold; and some kind of an immanent or pantheistic deity working IN things rather than above them is, if any, the kind recommended to our contemporary imagination.

Affirming the Absolute Mind, which is its substitute for God, to be the rational presupposition of all particulars of fact, whatever they may be, it remains supremely indifferent to what the particular facts in our world actually are. Be they what they may, the Absolute will father them. Like the sick lion in Esop's fable, all footprints lead into his den, but nulla vestigia retrorsum. You cannot redescend into the world of particulars by the Absolute's aid, or deduce any necessary consequences of detail important for your life from your idea of his nature. He gives you indeed the assurance that all is well with Him, and for his eternal way of thinking; but thereupon he leaves you to be finitely saved by your own temporal devices.

The prince of darkness may be a gentleman, as we are told he is, but whatever the God of earth and heaven is, he can surely be no gentleman. His menial services are needed in the dust of our human trials, even more than his dignity is needed in the empyrean.

Now pragmatism, devoted tho she be to facts, has no such materialistic bias as ordinary empiricism labors under. Moreover, she has no objection whatever to the realizing of abstractions, so long as you get about among particulars with their aid and they actually carry you somewhere. Interested in no conclusions but those which our minds and our experiences work out together, she has no a priori prejudices against theology.

In other words, the greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths. Truths have once for all this desperate instinct of self-preservation and of desire to extinguish whatever contradicts them. My belief in the Absolute, based on the good it does me, must run the gauntlet of all my other beliefs. Grant that it may be true in giving me a moral holiday. Nevertheless, as I conceive it,—and let me speak now confidentially, as it were, and merely in my own private person,—it clashes with other truths of mine whose benefits I hate to give up on its account. It happens to be associated with a kind of logic of which I am the enemy, I find that it entangles me in metaphysical paradoxes that are inacceptable, etc., etc.. But as I have enough trouble in life already without adding the trouble of carrying these intellectual inconsistencies, I personally just give up the Absolute.

Notes From The Underground, Myworld and the Existentialist's Primary Good

2009-10-14T15:54:00.001-05:00

Advantage! What is advantage? And will you take it upon yourself to define with perfect accuracy in what the advantage of man consists? And what if it so happens that a man’s advantage, sometimes, not only may, but even must, consist in his desiring in certain cases what is harmful to himself and not advantageous. And if so, if there can be such a case, the whole principle falls into dust…You see, you gentlemen have, to the best of my knowledge, taken your whole register of human advantages from the averages of statistical figures and politico-economical formulas. Your advantages are prosperity, wealth, freedom, peace — and so on, and so on. So that the man who should, for instance, go openly and knowingly in opposition to all that list would to your thinking, and indeed mine, too, of course, be an obscurantist or an absolute madman: would not he? But, you know, this is what is surprising: why does it so happen that all these statisticians, sages and lovers of humanity, when they reckon up human advantages invariably leave out one?

The fact is, gentlemen, it seems there must really exist something that is dearer to almost every man than his greatest advantages, or (not to be illogical) there is a most advantageous advantage (the very one omitted of which we spoke just now) which is more important and more advantageous than all other advantages, for the sake of which a man if necessary is ready to act in opposition to all laws; that is, in opposition to reason, honour, peace, prosperity — in fact, in opposition to all those excellent and useful things if only he can attain that fundamental, most advantageous advantage which is dearer to him than all….What matters is, that this advantage is remarkable from the very fact that it breaks down all our classifications, and continually shatters every system constructed by lovers of mankind for the benefit of mankind. In fact, it upsets everything.

Man everywhere and at all times, whoever he may be, has preferred to act as he chose and not in the least as his reason and advantage dictated. And one may choose what is contrary to one’s own interests, and sometimes one positively ought (that is my idea). One’s own free unfettered choice, one’s own caprice, however wild it may be, one’s own fancy worked up at times to frenzy — is that very “most advantageous advantage” which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms. And how do these wiseacres know that man wants a normal, a virtuous choice? What has made them conceive that man must want a rationally advantageous choice? What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice.

Lincoln, Opposition to Mob-Rule

2009-10-12T12:07:00.001-05:00

January 27, 1837.

As a subject for the remarks of the evening, "The Perpetuation of our Political Institutions" is selected.

In the great journal of things happening under the sun, we, the American people, find our account running under date of the nineteenth century of the Christian era. We find ourselves in the peaceful possession of the fairest portion of the earth as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate. We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty than any of which the history of former times tells us. We, when mounting the stage of existence, found ourselves the legal inheritors of these fundamental blessings. We toiled not in the acquirement or establishment of them; they are a legacy bequeathed us by a once hardy, brave, and patriotic, but now lamented and departed, race of ancestors. Theirs was the task (and nobly they performed it) to possess themselves, and through themselves us, of this goodly land, and to uprear upon its hills and its valleys a political edifice of liberty and equal rights; it is ours only to transmit these—the former unprofaned by the foot of an invader, the latter undecayed by the lapse of time and untorn by usurpation—to the latest generation that fate shall permit the world to know. This task gratitude to our fathers, justice to ourselves, duty to posterity, and love for our species in general, all imperatively require us faithfully to perform.

How then shall we perform it? At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years.

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer: If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

I hope I am over-wary; but if I am not, there is even now something of ill omen amongst us. I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country—the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions in lieu of the sober judgment of courts, and the worse than savage mobs for the executive ministers of justice. This disposition is awfully fearful in any community; and that it now exists in ours, though grating to our feelings to admit, it would be a violation of truth and an insult to our intelligence to deny. Accounts of outrages committed by mobs form the everyday news of the times. They have pervaded the country from New England to Louisiana; they are neither peculiar to the eternal snows of the former nor the burning suns of the latter; they are not the creature of climate, neither are they confined to the slave holding or the non-slave holding States. Alike they spring up among the pleasure-hunting masters of Southern slaves, and the order-loving citizens of the land of steady habits. Whatever then their cause may be, it is common to the whole country.

It would be tedious as well as useless to recount the horrors of all of them. Those happening in the State of Mississippi and at St. Louis are perhaps the most dangerous in example and revolting to humanity. In the Mississippi case they first commenced by hanging the regular gamblers—a set of men certainly not following for a livelihood a very useful or very honest occupation, but one which, so far from being forbidden by the laws, was actually licensed by an act of the Legislature passed but a single year before. Next, negroes suspected of conspiring to raise an insurrection were caught up and hanged in all parts of the State; then, white men supposed to be leagued with the negroes; and finally, strangers from neighboring States, going thither on business, were in many instances subjected to the same fate. Thus went on this process of hanging, from gamblers to negroes, from negroes to white citizens, and from these to strangers, till dead men were seen literally dangling from the boughs of trees upon every roadside, and in numbers almost sufficient to rival the native Spanish moss of the country as a drapery of the forest.

Turn then to that horror-striking scene at St. Louis. A single victim only was sacrificed there. This story is very short, and is perhaps the most highly tragic of anything of its length that has ever been witnessed in real life. A mulatto man by the name of McIntosh was seized in the street, dragged to the suburbs of the city, chained to a tree, and actually burned to death; and all within a single hour from the time he had been a freeman attending to his own business and at peace with the world.

Such are the effects of mob law, and such are the scenes becoming more and more frequent in this land so lately famed for love of law and order, and the stories of which have even now grown too familiar to attract anything more than an idle remark.

But you are perhaps ready to ask, "What has this to do with the perpetuation of our political institutions?" I answer, It has much to do with it. Its direct consequences are, comparatively speaking, but a small evil, and much of its danger consists in the proneness of our minds to regard its direct as its only consequences. Abstractly considered, the hanging of the gamblers at Vicksburg was of but little consequence. They constitute a portion of population that is worse than useless in any community; and their death, if no pernicious example be set by it, is never matter of reasonable regret with any one. If they were annually swept from the stage of existence by the plague or smallpox, honest men would perhaps be much profited by the operation. Similar too is the correct reasoning in regard to the burning of the negro at St. Louis. He had forfeited his life by the perpetration of an outrageous murder upon one of the most worthy and respectable citizens of the city, and had he not died as he did, he must have died by the sentence of the law in a very short time afterwards. As to him alone, it was as well the way it was as it could otherwise have been. But the example in either case was fearful. When men take it in their heads to-day to hang gamblers or burn murderers, they should recollect that in the confusion usually attending such transactions they will be as likely to hang or burn some one who is neither a gambler nor a murderer as one who is, and that, acting upon the example they set, the mob of to-morrow may, and probably will, hang or burn some of them by the very same mistake. And not only so: the innocent, those who have ever set their faces against violations of law in every shape, alike with the guilty fall victims to the ravages of mob law; and thus it goes on, step by step, till all the walls erected for the defense of the persons and property of individuals are trodden down and disregarded. But all this, even, is not the full extent of the evil. By such examples, by instances of the perpetrators of such acts going unpunished, the lawless in spirit are encouraged to become lawless in practice; and having been used to no restraint but dread of punishment, they thus become absolutely unrestrained. Having ever regarded government as their deadliest bane, they make a jubilee of the suspension of its operations, and pray for nothing so much as its total annihilation. While, on the other hand, good men, men who love tranquillity, who desire to abide by the laws and enjoy their benefits, who would gladly spill their blood in the defense of their country, seeing their property destroyed, their families insulted, and their lives endangered, their persons injured, and seeing nothing in prospect that forebodes a change for the better, become tired of and disgusted with a government that offers them no protection, and are not much averse to a change in which they imagine they have nothing to lose. Thus, then, by the operation of this mobocratic spirit which all must admit is now abroad in the land, the strongest bulwark of any government, and particularly of those constituted like ours, may effectually be broken down and destroyed—I mean the attachment of the people. Whenever this effect shall be produced among us; whenever the vicious portion of population shall be permitted to gather in bands of hundreds and thousands, and burn churches, ravage and rob provision-stores, throw printing presses into rivers, shoot editors, and hang and burn obnoxious persons at pleasure and with impunity, depend on it, this government cannot last. By such things the feelings of the best citizens will become more or less alienated from it, and thus it will be left without friends, or with too few, and those few too weak to make their friendship effectual. At such a time, and under such circumstances, men of sufficient talent and ambition will not be wanting to seize the opportunity, strike the blow, and overturn that fair fabric which for the last half century has been the fondest hope of the lovers of freedom throughout the world.

I know the American people are much attached to their government; I know they would suffer much for its sake; I know they would endure evils long and patiently before they would ever think of exchanging it for another,—yet, notwithstanding all this, if the laws be continually despised and disregarded, if their rights to be secure in their persons and property are held by no better tenure than the caprice of a mob, the alienation of their affections from the government is the natural consequence; and to that, sooner or later, it must come.

Here, then, is one point at which danger may be expected.

The question recurs, How shall we fortify against it? The answer is simple. Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well-wisher to his posterity swear by the blood of the Revolution never to violate in the least particular the laws of the country, and never to tolerate their violation by others. As the patriots of seventy-six did to the support of the Declaration of Independence, so to the support of the Constitution and laws let every American pledge his life, his property, and his sacred honor. Let every man remember that to violate the law is to trample on the blood of his father, and to tear the charter of his own and his children's liberty. Let reverence for the laws be breathed by every American mother to the lisping babe that prattles on her lap; let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges; let it be written in primers, spelling books, and in almanacs; let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice. And, in short, let it become the political religion of the nation; and let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay of all sexes and tongues and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars.

While ever a state of feeling such as this shall universally or even very generally prevail throughout the nation, vain will be every effort, and fruitless every attempt, to subvert our national freedom.

When, I so pressingly urge a strict observance of all the laws, let me not be understood as saying there are no bad laws, or that grievances may not arise for the redress of which no legal provisions have been made. I mean to say no such thing. But I do mean to say that although bad laws, if they exist, should be repealed as soon as possible, still, while they continue in force, for the sake of example they should be religiously observed. So also in unprovided cases. If such arise, let proper legal provisions be made for them with the least possible delay, but till then let them, if not too intolerable, be borne with.

There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law. In any case that may arise, as, for instance, the promulgation of abolitionism, one of two positions is necessarily true—that is, the thing is right within itself, and therefore deserves the protection of all law and all good citizens, or it is wrong, and therefore proper to be prohibited by legal enactments; and in neither case is the interposition of mob law either necessary, justifiable, or excusable.

But it may be asked, Why suppose danger to our political institutions? Have we not preserved them for more than fifty years? And why may we not for fifty times as long?

We hope there is no sufficient reason. We hope all danger may be overcome; but to conclude that no danger may ever arise would itself be extremely dangerous. There are now, and will hereafter be, many causes, dangerous in their tendency, which have not existed heretofore, and which are not too insignificant to merit attention. That our government should have been maintained in its original form, from its establishment until now, is not much to be wondered at. It had many props to support it through that period, which now are decayed and crumbled away. Through that period it was felt by all to be an undecided experiment; now it is understood to be a successful one. Then, all that sought celebrity and fame and distinction expected to find them in the success of that experiment. Their all was staked upon it; their destiny was inseparably linked with it. Their ambition aspired to display before an admiring world a practical demonstration of the truth of a proposition which had hitherto been considered at best no better than problematical—namely, the capability of a people to govern themselves. If they succeeded they were to be immortalized; their names were to be transferred to counties, and cities, and rivers, and mountains; and to be revered and sung, toasted through all time. If they failed, they were to be called knaves and fools, and fanatics for a fleeting hour; then to sink and be forgotten. They succeeded. The experiment is successful, and thousands have won their deathless names in making it so. But the game is caught; and I believe it is true that with the catching end the pleasures of the chase. This field of glory is harvested, and the crop is already appropriated. But new reapers will arise, and they too will seek a field. It is to deny what the history of the world tells us is true, to suppose that men of ambition and talents will not continue to spring up amongst us. And when they do, they will as naturally seek the gratification of their ruling passion as others have done before them. The question then is, Can that gratification be found in supporting and in maintaining an edifice that has been erected by others? Most certainly it cannot. Many great and good men, sufficiently qualified for any task they should undertake, may ever be found whose ambition would aspire to nothing beyond a seat in Congress, a Gubernatorial or a Presidential chair; but such belong not to the family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle. What! think you these places would satisfy an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon? Never! Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored. It sees no distinction in adding story to story upon the monuments of fame erected to the memory of others. It denies that it is glory enough to serve under any chief. It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious. It thirsts and burns for distinction; and if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves or enslaving freemen. Is it unreasonable, then, to expect that some man possessed of the loftiest genius, coupled with ambition sufficient to push it to its utmost stretch, will at some time spring up among us? And when such an one does it will require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs.

Distinction will be his paramount object, and although he would as willingly, perhaps more so, acquire it by doing good as harm, yet, that opportunity being past, and nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down.

Here then is a probable case, highly dangerous, and such an one as could not have well existed heretofore.

Another reason which once was, but which, to the same extent, is now no more, has done much in maintaining our institutions thus far. I mean the powerful influence which the interesting scenes of the Revolution had upon the passions of the people as distinguished from their judgment. By this influence, the jealousy, envy, and avarice incident to our nature, and so common to a state of peace, prosperity, and conscious strength, were for the time in a great measure smothered and rendered inactive, while the deep-rooted principles of hate, and the powerful motive of revenge, instead of being turned against each other, were directed exclusively against the British nation. And thus, from the force of circumstances, the basest principles of our nature were either made to lie dormant, or to become the active agents in the advancement of the noblest of causes—that of establishing and maintaining civil and religious liberty.

But this state of feeling must fade, is fading, has faded, with the circumstances that produced it.

I do not mean to say that the scenes of the Revolution are now or ever will be entirely forgotten, but that, like everything else, they must fade upon the memory of the world, and grow more and more dim by the lapse of time. In history, we hope, they will be read of, and recounted, so long as the Bible shall be read; but even granting that they will, their influence cannot be what it heretofore has been. Even then they cannot be so universally known nor so vividly felt as they were by the generation just gone to rest. At the close of that struggle, nearly every adult male had been a participator in some of its scenes. The consequence was that of those scenes, in the form of a husband, a father, a son, or a brother, a living history was to be found in every family—a history bearing the indubitable testimonies of its own authenticity, in the limbs mangled, in the scars of wounds received, in the midst of the very scenes related—a history, too, that could be read and understood alike by all, the wise and the ignorant, the learned and the unlearned. But those histories are gone. They can be read no more forever. They were a fortress of strength; but what invading foeman could never do the silent artillery of time has done—the leveling of its walls. They are gone. They were a forest of giant oaks; but the all-restless hurricane has swept over them, and left only here and there a lonely trunk, despoiled of its verdure, shorn of its foliage, unshading and unshaded, to murmur in a few more gentle breezes, and to combat with its mutilated limbs a few more ruder storms, then to sink and be no more.

They were pillars of the temple of liberty; and now that they have crumbled away that temple must fall unless we, their descendants, supply their places with other pillars, hewn from the solid quarry of sober reason. Passion has helped us, but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason—must furnish all the materials for our future support and defense. Let those materials be moulded into general intelligence, sound morality, and in particular, a reverence for the Constitution and laws; and that we improved to the last, that we remained free to the last, that we revered his name to the last, that during his long sleep we permitted no hostile foot to pass over or desecrate his resting place, shall be that which to learn the last trump shall awaken our Washington.

Upon these let the proud fabric of freedom rest, as the rock of its basis; and as truly as has been said of the only greater institution, "the gates of hell shall not prevail against it."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

2009-10-12T10:59:00.004-05:00

Notes, Emerson and Carlyle Letters, Oct 2009

Emerson: "We talked of books. Plato he does not read, and he disparaged Socrates; and, when pressed, persisted in making Mirabeau a hero. Gibbon he called the splendid bridge from the old world to the new. His own reading had been multifarious. Tristram Shandy was one of his first books after Robinson Crusoe and Robertson's America, an early favorite. Rousseau's Confessions had discovered to him that he was not a dunce; and it was now ten years since he had learned German, by the advice of a man who told him he would find in that language what he wanted."

"He took despairing or satirical views of literature at this moment; recounted the incredible sums paid in one year by the great booksellers for puffing. Hence it comes that no newspaper is trusted now, no books are bought, and the booksellers are on the eve of bankruptcy." Me: Do likewise. Quoting Carlyle: 'Government should direct poor men what to do. Poor Irish folk come wandering over these moors; my dame makes it a rule to give to every son of Adam bread to eat, and supplies his wants to the next house. But here are thousands of acres which might give them all meat, and nobody to bid these poor Irish go to the moor and till it. They burned the stacks, and so found a way to force the rich people to attend to them.'

Emerson: There we sat down and talked of the immortality of the soul. It was not Carlyle's fault that we talked on that topic, for he has the natural disinclination of every nimble spirit to bruise itself against walls, and did not like to place himself where no step can be taken.

Me: In genius there is a whisper of the devil.

Emerson: "I am glad that one living scholar is self-centred, and will be true to himself though none ever were before; who, as Montaigne says, "puts his ear close by himself, and holds his breath and listens." And none can be offended with the self-subsistency of one so catholic and jocund."

Emerson: "If you love such sequences, then admit, as you will, that no poet is sent into the world before his time; that all the departed thinkers and actors have paved your way; that (at least when you surrender yourself) nations and ages do guide your pen, yes, and common goose-quills as well as your diamond graver."

E: "And must not we say that Drunkenness is a virtue rather than that Cato has erred?"

Aside: The repeal of the Oppian law is a fascinating story about women, fashion, status and society. "Curiously, this particular challenge spawned far more interest than the most important affairs of state. The middle-aged married women of Rome crowded the streets, denied access to every avenue to the forum, and intercepted their husbands as they approached, demanding them to restore the ancient ornaments of the Roman matrons."

On Cato the Censorious: "He was struck with horror, along with many other Romans of the graver stamp, at the licence of the Bacchanalian mysteries, which he attributed to the influence of Greek manners; and he vehemently urged the dismissal of the philosophers (Carneades, Diogenes, and Critolaus), who came as ambassadors from Athens, on account of the dangerous nature of the views expressed by them."

Me: Dangerous philosophers descend on Chattanooga. Why? The publication of JA's Architectonica, moths to a flame. Among these dangerous philosophers and not late to arrive was Elijah Grey. He stood back and abided and stayed at an inn.

Carlyle: "Not till we can think that here and there one is thinking of us, one is loving us, does this waste Earth become a peopled Garden." (citing someone else)
___________________________________________________

Emerson, The American Scholar, at Harvard speech --

"Thus far, our holiday has been simply a friendly sign of the survival of the love of letters amongst a people too busy to give to letters any more. As such it is precious as the sign of an indestructible instinct. Perhaps the time is already come when it ought to be, and will be, something else; when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids and fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close."

"It is one of those fables which out of an unknown antiquity convey an unlooked-for wisdom, that the gods, in the beginning, divided Man into men, that he might be more helpful to himself; just as the hand was divided into fingers, the better to answer its end."

"The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime; that there is One Man,—present to all particular men only partially, or through one faculty; and that you must take the whole society to find the whole man."

"But, unfortunately, this original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered. The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk and strut about so many walking monsters,—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man."

All things have two handles: Beware of the wrong one. -- Epictetus

"Far too as her splendors shine, system on system shooting like rays, upward, downward, without center, without circumference,—in the mass and in the particle, Nature hastens to render account of herself to the mind."

"So much of nature as he is ignorant of, so much of his own mind does he not yet possess. And, in fine, the ancient precept, "Know thyself," and the modern precept, "Study nature," become at last one maxim."

On books: "Yet hence arises a grave mischief. The sacredness which attaches to the act of creation, the act of thought, is instantly transferred to the record. The poet chanting was felt to be a divine man. Henceforth the chant is divine also. The writer was a just and wise spirit. Henceforward it is settled the book is perfect; as love of the hero corrupts into worship of his statue. Instantly the book becomes noxious. The guide is a tyrant. We sought a brother, and lo, a governor. The sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, always slow to open to the incursions of Reason, having once so opened, having once received this book, stands upon it, and makes an outcry if it is disparaged. Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by thinkers, not by Man Thinking, by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles. Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given; forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books."

"I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system."

"The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius. This is good, say they,—let us hold by this. They pin me down."

"But when the intervals of darkness come, as come they must,—when the soul seeth not, when the sun is hid and the stars withdraw their shining,—we repair to the lamps which were kindled by their ray, to guide our steps to the East again, where the dawn is. We hear, that we may speak. The Arabian proverb says, "A fig-tree, looking on a fig-tree, becometh fruitful."

"Of course there is a portion of reading quite indispensable to a wise man. History and exact science he must learn by laborious reading. Colleges, in like manner, have their indispensable office,—to teach elements. But they can only highly serve us when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and by the concentrated fires set the hearts of their youth on flame. Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and our American colleges will recede in their public importance, whilst they grow richer every year."

"There goes in the world a notion that the scholar should be a recluse, a valetudinarian" -- a man of weak or sickly constitution.

"Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no scholar without the heroic mind."

"Drudgery, calamity, exasperation, want, are instructors in eloquence and wisdom. The true scholar grudges every opportunity of action passed by, as a loss of power."

"The actions and events of our childhood and youth are now matters of calmest observation. They lie like fair pictures in the air. Not so with our recent actions,—with the business which we now have in hand. On this we are quite unable to speculate. Our affections as yet circulate through it. We no more feel or know it than we feel the feet, or the hand, or the brain of our body."

"So is there no fact, no event, in our private history, which shall not, sooner or later, lose its adhesive, inert form, and astonish us by soaring from our body into the empyrean. Cradle and infancy, school and playground, the fear of boys, and dogs, and ferules, the love of little maids and berries, and many another fact that once filled the whole sky, are gone already; friend and relative, profession and party, town and country, nation and world, must also soar and sing."

"If it were only for a vocabulary, the scholar would be covetous of action. Life is our dictionary."

"That great principle of Undulation in nature, that shows itself in the inspiring and expiring of the breath; in desire and satiety; in the ebb and flow of the sea; in day and night; in heat and cold; and, as yet more deeply ingrained in every atom and every fluid, is known to us under the name of Polarity,—these "fits of easy transmission and reflection," as Newton called them, are the law of nature because they are the law of spirit."

Polarity, or action and reaction, we meet in every part of nature; in darkness and light; in heat and cold; in the ebb and flow of waters; in male and female; in the inspiration and expiration of plants and animals; in the equation of quantity and quality in the fluids of the animal body; in the systole and diastole[98] of the heart; in the undulations of fluids, and of sound; in the centrifugal and centripetal gravity; in electricity, galvanism, and chemical affinity. Superinduce magnetism at one end of a needle; the opposite magnetism takes place at the other end. If the south attracts, the north repels. To empty here, you must condense there. An inevitable dualism bisects nature, so that each thing is a half, and suggests another thing to make it whole; as, spirit, matter; man, woman; odd, even; subjective, objective; in, out; upper, under; motion, rest; yea, nay.

"But he, in his private observatory, cataloguing obscure and nebulous stars of the human mind, which as yet no man has thought of as such,—watching days and months sometimes for a few facts; correcting still his old records,—must relinquish display and immediate fame. In the long period of his preparation he must betray often an ignorance and shiftlessness in popular arts, incurring the disdain of the able who shoulder him aside. Long he must stammer in his speech; often forego the living for the dead. Worse yet, he must accept—how often!—poverty and solitude."

"In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself; add observation to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach, and bide his own time,—happy enough if he can satisfy himself alone that this day he has seen something truly."

"In self-trust all the virtues are comprehended."

"What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold is there only by sufferance,—by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow."

"Men such as they are very naturally seek money or power; and power because it is as good as money,—the "spoils," so called, "of office." And why not? For they aspire to the highest, and this, in their sleep-walking, they dream is highest."

"It is one central fire, which, flaming now out of the lips of Etna, lightens the capes of Sicily, and now out of the throat of Vesuvius, illuminates the towers and vineyards of Naples. It is one light which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which animates all men."

"Our age is bewailed as the age of Introversion. Must that needs be evil? We, it seems, are critical. We are embarrassed with second thoughts. We cannot enjoy anything for hankering to know whereof the pleasure consists. We are lined with eyes. We see with our feet. The time is infected with Hamlet's unhappiness,—

"Sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought."

"Is it so bad then? Sight is the last thing to be pitied. Would we be blind? Do we fear lest we should outsee nature and God, and drink truth dry? I look upon the discontent of the literary class as a mere announcement of the fact that they find themselves not in the state of mind of their fathers, and regret the coming state as untried; as a boy dreads the water before he has learned that he can swim."

"Man is surprised to find that things near are not less beautiful and wondrous than things remote. The near explains the far. The drop is a small ocean."

"Everything that tends to insulate the individual—to surround him with barriers of natural respect, so that each man shall feel the world is his, and man shall treat with man as a sovereign state with a sovereign state—tends to true union as well as greatness."

"f there be one lesson more than another that should pierce his ear, it is—The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all; it is for you to dare all."

After Virtue

2009-03-23T10:16:00.001-05:00

Alasdair MacIntyre, book notes

AFTER VIRTUE, all words and ideas are MacIntyre's unless otherwise attributed.

Hypothesis: in the actual world which we inhabit the language of morality is in a state of grave disorder. What we possess are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have -- very largely, if not entirely -- lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, or morality.

There seems to be no rational way of securing moral agreement in our culture. Disagreements share three salient characteristics.
1) conceptual incommensurability of the rival arguments -- every one of the arguments is logically valid or can be easily expanded so as to be made so; the conclusions do indeed follow from the premises; but the rival premises are such that we possess no rational way of weighing the claims of one as against another; thus, moral arguments are necessarily interminable; first premises a matter of pure assertiona and counter assertion; further, it seems that underlying my own position there must be some non-rational decision to adopt that position.
2) nonetheless, these arguments purport to be impersonal rational arguments and as such are usually presented in a mode appropriate to that impersonality.
3) the incommensurable premises deployed in the rival arguments have a wide variety of historical origins

In the transition from the variety of contexts in which they were originally at home to our own contemporary culture 'virtue' and 'justice' and 'piety' and 'duty' and even 'ought' have become other than they once were.

Contemporary moral argument is rationally interminable, because all moral, indeed all evaluative, argument is and always must be rational interminable. Contemporary moral disagreements of a certain kind cannot be resolved, because no moral disagreements of that kind in any age, past, present or future, can be resolved.

Emotivism is the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character.

GE Moore's threefold discovery:
1) 'good' is the name of a simple, indefinable property, a property different from that named by 'pleasant' or 'conducive to evolutionary survival' or any other natural property; 'good' is a "non-natural property", propositions declaring this or that 'good' are what Moore called 'intuitions'; they are incapable of proof or disproof.
2) 'right' is that action which of all the available alternatives is the one which does or did as a matter of fact produce the most good.
3) personal affections and aesthetic enjoyments include all the greatest, and by far the greatest goods we can imagine; this is the ultimate truth of Moral Philosophy. The achievement of friendship and the contemplation of what is beautiful in nature or in art become certainly almost the sole and perhaps the sole justifiable ends of all human action.

Moore's three central positions are logically independent of each other. There would be no breach of consistency if one were to affirm any one of the three and deny the other two. The second crucial fact is that the first part of what Moore says is plainly false and the second and third parts are at the very least highly contentious. Moore's arguments at times are, it must seem now, highly defective; a great deal is asserted rather than argued. And yet it is this to us plainly false, badly argued position which Keynes treated as 'the beginning of a renaissance', which Lytton Strachey declared to have 'shattered all writers on ethics from Aristotle and Christ to Herbert Spencer and Mr Bradley' and which Leonard Woolf described as 'substituting for the religious and philosophical nightmares, delusions, hallucinations in which Jehovah, Christ, and St Paul, Plato, Kant and Hegel had entangled us, the fresh air and pure light of commonsense.'

This is great silliness of course; but it is the great silliness of highly intelligent and perceptive people.

If two observers disagree: according to Keynes, either the two were focusing on different subject matters, without recognising this, or one had perceptions superior to the other. But of course, as Keynes tells us, what was really happening was something quite other: 'In practice, victory was with those who could speak with the greatest appearance of clear, undoubting conviction and could best use the accounts of infallibility' and Keynes goes on to describe the effectiveness of Moore's gasps of incredulity and head-shaking, of Strachey's grim silences and of Lowes Dickinson's shrugs.

There is evident here precisely that gap between the meaning and purport of what was being said and the use to which utterance was being put to which our reinterpretation of emotivism drew attention.

It is no accident that the acutest of the modern founders of emotivism, philosophers such as F.P. Ramsey, Austin Duncan-Jones and C.L. Stevenson, were pupils of Moore; it is not implausible that they did in fact confuse moral utterance at Cambridge after 1903 with moral utterance as such, and that they therefore presented what was in essentials a correct account of the former as though it were an account of the latter.

What makes emotivism convincing as a thesis about a certain kind of moral utterance at Cambridge after 1903 are certain features specific to that historical period. Those whose evaluative utterances embodied Moore's interpretations of those utterances could not have been doing what they took themselves to be doing because of the falsity of Moore's thesis. But nothing whatsoever seems to follow about moral utterances in general. Emotivism on this account turns out to be an empirical thesis, or rather a preliminary sketch of an empirical thesis, presumably to be filled out later by psychological and sociological and historical observations, about those who continue to use moral and other evaluative expressions, as if they were governed by objective and impersonal criteria, when all grasp of any such criterion has been lost.

Carnap's version fo emotivism, for example -- in which the characterization of moral utterances as expressions of feeling or attitude is a desperate attempt to find some status for them after his theory of meaning and his theory of science have expelled them from the realm of the factual and the descriptive -- was based on the most meagre attention to their specific character.

A presupposition of the scheme of development [MacIntyre] sketches is that genuine objective and impersonal moral standards can in some way or other be rationally justified, even if in some cultures at some stages the possibility of such rational justification is no longer available. This is what emotivism denies.

Emotivism rests upon a claim that every attempt, whether past or present, to provide a rational justification for an objective morality has in fact failed. What emotivism however did fail to reckon with is the difference that it would make to morality if emotivism were not only true but also widely believed to be true. That is, if and insofar as emotivism is true, moral language is seriously misleading and, if and insofar as emotivism is justifiably believed, presumably the use of traditional and inherited moral language ought to be abandoned. This conclusion none of the emotivists drew; and it is clear that, like Stevenson, they failed to draw it because the misconstrued their own theory as a theory of meaning.

Analytical philosophers had defined the central task of philosophy as that of deciphering the meaning of key expressions in both everyday and scientific language; and since emotivism fails precisely as a theory of the meaning of moral expressions, analytical philosophers by and large rejected emotivism. The resistance to emotivism has arisen from the perception that moral reasoning does occur, that there can be logical linkages between various moral judgments of a kind that emotivism itself could not allow. Yet the most influential account of moral reasoning that emerged in response to this critique of emotivism was one according to which an agent can only justifiy a particular judgment by referring to some universal rule from which it may be logically derived, and can only justify the rule in turn by deriving it from some more general rule or principle; but on this view since every chain of reasoning must be finite, such a process of justificatory reasoning must always terminate with the assertion of some rule of principle for which no further reason can be given.

The terminus of justification is thus always, on this view, a not further to be justified choice, a choice unguided by criteria. Each individual implicitly or explicitly has to adopt his or her own first principles on the basis of such choice.

To this is replied: rationality itself might supply morality with a basis and a basis such that we have adequate grounds for rejecting emotivist and subjectivist accounts. [Me: basis located in positive, functional knowledge].

It would generally be a decisive refutation of a moral philosophy to show that moral agency on its own account of the matter could never be socially embodied; and it also follows that we have not fully understood the claims of any moral philosophy until we have spelled out what its social embodiment would be.

The key to the social content of emotivism: it entails the obliteration of any genuine distinction between manipulative and non-manipulative social relations. For evaluative utterance can in the end have no point or use but the expression of my own feelings or attitudes and the transformation of the feelings and attitudes of others.

Portrait of a Lady turns out to be, in the words of William Gass, an investigation 'of what it means to be a consumer of persons, and of what it means to be a person consumed.' The metaphor of consumption acquires its appropriateness from the milieu; James is concerned with rich aesthetes whose interest is to fend off the kind of boredom that is so characteristic of modern leisure by contriving behavior in others that will be responsive to their wishes, that will feed their sated appetites. The last enemy is boredom. These are environments in which the problem of enjoyment arises in the context of leisure, in which large sums of money have created some social distnce from the necessity of work.

Weber: Bureaucratic rationality is the rationality of matching means to ends economically and efficiently. Questions of ends are questions of values, and on values reason is silent; conflict between rival values cannot be rationally settled. Instead one must simply choose -- between parties, classes, nations, causes, ideals. 'Values', says Raymond Aron in his exposition of Weber's view, 'are created by human decisions...' and again he ascribes to Weber the view that 'each man's conscience is irrefutable' and that values rest on 'a choice whose justification is purely subjective.' An agent may be more or less rational in acting consistent with his values, but the choice of any one particular evaluative stance or commitment can be no more rational than that of any other. In Weber, the contrast between power and authority is effective obliterated. As Philip Rieff noted, 'Weber's ends, the causes to be served, are means of acting; they cannot escape service to power' (Rieff 1975, p. 22). No type of authority can appeal to rational criteria to vindicate itself except that type of bureaucratic authority which appeals precisely to its own effectiveness. And what this appeal reveals is that bureacratic authority is nothing other than successful power. [Me: authority can only appeal to consensus criteria, values may not be rationally got, but they can be rationally unconcealed (articulated) and ordered.]

Characters are the moral representatives of their culture and they are so because of the way in whch moral and metaphysical ideas and theories assume through them an embodied existence in the social world. Characters are the masks worn by moral philosophies.

It is by way of their intentions that individuals express bodies of moral belief in their actions. For all intentions presuppose more or less complex, more or less coherent, more or less explicit bodies of belief, sometimes of moral belief. [Me: thus our moral instinct to judge agents by their intended actions; see Hauser.]

The manager represents in his character the obliteration of the distinction between manipulative and nonmanipulative social relations; the therapist represents the same obliteration in the sphere of personal life. Both treat ends as given, as outside his scope; his concern is with technique, with effectiveness. Rieff has documented the ways in which truth has been displaced as a value and replaced by psychological effectiveness.

The specifically modern self, the self that I have called emotivist, finds no limits set to that on which it may pass judgment for such limits could only derive from rational criteria for evaluation and, as we have seen, the emotivist self lacks any such criteria. Everything may be criticised from whatever standpoint the self has adopted, including the self's choice of standpoint to adopt. To be a moral agent is, on this view, precisely to be able to stand back from any and every situation in which one is involved, from any and every characteristic that one may possess, and to pass judgment on it from a purely universal and abstract pont of view that is totally detached from all social particularity. Anyone and everyone can thus be a moral agent, since it is in the self and not in social roles or practices that moral agency has to be located. The contrast between this democratisation of moral agency and the elitist monopolies of managerial and therapeutic expertise could not be sharper. Any minimally rational agent is to be account a moral agent; but managers and therapists enjoy their status in virtue of their membership within hierarchies of imputed skill and knowledge. In the domain of fact there are procedures for eliminating disagreement; in that of morals the ultimacy of disagreement is dignified by the title of 'pluralism'. [Me: There is a distinction between 'the fact of pluralism' and 'the ultimacy of pluralism'.]

This democratised self which has no necessary social content and no necessary social identity can then be anything, can assume any role or take any point of view, because it is in and for itself nothing. [Me: some roles are heavier to carry than others, some are impossible to lift, for very long or at all -- preparation has her say.]

Sartre's self-discovery is characterized as the discovery that the self is 'nothing', is not a substance but a set of perpetually open possibilities. [Me: for the self the past is closed, the future uncertain, the present constrained.]

Inner conflicts are for it necessary au fond the confrontation of one contingent arbitrariness by another. It is a self of no given continuities, save those of the body which is its bearer and of the memory which to the best of its ability gathers in its past.

The self is now thought of as lacking any necessary social identity, because the kind of social identity that it once enjoyed is no longer available; the self is now thought of as criterionless, because the kind of telos in terms of which it once judged and acted is no longer thought to be credible. [Me: social identity is too fluid and fuzzy; the solution is to establish a floor of identity, that of citizen, and define its telos; can only do this after unanimity in the original position, after a Myworld and Ourworld agreement reached during reflective room temperature.]

In pre-modern, traditional societies it is through his or her membership of a variety of social groups that the individual identifies himself or herself and is identified by others. To know oneself as such a social person is however not to occupy a static and fixed position. It is to find oneself placed at a certain point on a journey with set goals; to move through life is to make progress -- or to fail to make progress -- toward a given end. Thus a completed and fulfilled life is an achievement and death is the point at which someone can be judged happy or unhappy. Hence the old Greek proverb: 'Call no man happy until he is dead.' [Me: Myworldline, Kahneman's prospect theory, Pynchon's 'last delta-t' -- Myworldline and the 'shadow of the future' is cast on Myworld.]

The concept of a whole human life is the primary subject of objective and impersonal evaluation, of a type of evaluation which provides the content for judgment upon the particular actions or projects of a given individual.

Nowadays: these appear to be the superstitions of teleology.

Northern European enlightenment culture: it was a musical culture and there is perhaps a closer relationship between this fact and the central philosophical problems of the culture than has usually been recognized. For the relationship of our beliefs to sentences that we only or primarily sing, let alone to the music which accompanies those sentences, is not at all the same as the relationship of our beliefs to the sentences that we primarily say and say in an assertive mode. When the Catholic mass becomes a genre available for concert performance by Protestants, when we listen to the scripture because of what Bach wrote rather than because of what St Matthew wrote, then sacred texts are being preserved in a form in which the traditional links with belief have been broken, even in some measure for those who still count themselves believers. It is not of course that there is no link with belief; you cannot simply detach the music of Bach or even of Handel from Christian religion. But a traditional distinction between the religious and the aesthetic has bee blurred.

In Latin, as in ancient Greek, there is no word correctly translated by our word 'moral'; or rather there is no such word until our word 'moral' is translated back into Latin. Certainly 'moral' is the etymological descendant of 'moralis'. But 'moralis', like its Greek predecessor ethikos -- Cicero invented 'moralis' to translate the Greek word in the De Fato -- means 'pertaining to character' where a man's character is nothing other than his set dispositions to behave systematically in one way rather than another, to lead one particular kind of life. [Me: when matched with the discoveries of Hauser and Stanovich, yet further evidence that the ancients/unsophisticated are purer, less conceptually modified, less diluted examples of human nature; a higher molarity of human nature exists in their smaller set of words; the prehistoric peoples even more so, I would imagine; this is the value-neutral observation]

The early uses of 'moral' in English translate the Latin and move to its use as a noun where 'the moral' of any literary passage is the practical lesson that it teaches. In these early uses 'moral' contrasts neither with such expressions as 'prudential' or 'self-interested' nor with such expressions as 'legal' or 'religious'. The word to which it is closest in meaning is perhaps simply 'practical'. Its subsequent history is one in which it is first perhaps most usually part of the expression 'moral virtue' and then becomes a predicate in its own right with a continual tendency to narrow its meaning, especially as it applies to sexual behavior.

From 1630 - 1850, 'morality' became the name for that particular sphere in which rules of conduct which are neither theological nor legal nor aesthetic are allowed a cultural space of their own. [Me: the question is the machinery; what neurological regions are activated during moral judgments versus other kind of judgments? -- you'll find that many things are neurologically similar to 'moral judgment' in their patterned activity.]

In Kierkegaard's Enten-Eller, the choice between the ethical and the aesthetic is not the choice between good and evil, it is the choice whether or not to choose in terms of good and evil. At the heart of the aesthetic way of life, as Kierkegaard characterises it, is the attempt to lose the self in the immediacy of present experience. [Me: not a complete description; the aesthetic encompasses both Myworld and Myworldline.] By contrast the paradigm of the ethical is marriage, a state of commitment and obligation through time, in whch the present is bound by the past and to the future. No reason can be offered for preferring one to the other. [Me: the real distinction is between Lebensanschauung and Weltanschauung; between the self-centering (Myworld) and the self-objectifying (Ourworld) standpoints; it is important to be clear which perspective one is arguing from; the void between the two can be bridged by contract only.]

[Me: no reason is necessary for why 'I' prefer the self-centering standpoint. I exist. By definition I am the center of my world. Neither right nor duty compels me to stand firmly in the center; it is what I am, what I do, and nothing less; the only reason to shift to the Ourworld perspective is if it becomes preferable for me to do so, if it follows from one of my self-elected Myworld premises.]

It would follow that a principle for the choice of which no reasons could be given would be a principle devoid of authority. By now the doctrine of Enten-Eller is plainly to the effect that the principles which depect the ethical way of life are to be adopted for no reason, but for a choice that lies beyond reasons, just because it is the choice of what is to count for us as a reason.

In our own culture the influence of the notion of radical choice appears in our dilemmas over which ethical principles to choose. We are almost intolerably conscious of rival moral alternatives.

Central to Kant's moral philosophy are two deceptively simple theses: if the rules of morality are rational, they must be the same for all rational beings, in just the way that the rules of arithmetic are; and if the rules of morality are binding on all rational beings, then the contingent ability of such beings to carry them out must be unimportant -- what is important is their will to carry them out. The project of discovering a rational justification of morality therefore simply is the project of discovering a rational test which will discriminate those maxims which are a genuine expression of the moral law when they determine the will from those maxims which are not such an expression. [Me: rational Myworld test -- last maxim standing?, stable over time, positive externalities, competitive success, practitioner satisfaction; also, the brain's "moral judgment" algorithm is logical; the horizontal relationships between discrete outputs are not; moral philosophy has been focused on the latter; what of the 'V'-relationships? -- the angular relationships.]

On Kant's view it can never follow from the fact that God commands us to do such-and-such that we ought to do such-and-such.

Kant: I may propose a course of action to someone either by offering him reasons for so acting or by trying to influence him in non-rational ways. If I do the former I treat him as a rational will, worthy of the same respect as is due to myself. By contrast an attempt at non-rational suasion embodies an attempt to make the agen a mere instrument of my will, without any regard for his rationality.

The project of providing a rational vindication of morality had decisively failed; and from henceforward the morality of our predecessor culture -- and subsequently of our own -- lacked any public, shared rationale or justification. In a world of secular rationality religion could no longer provide such a shared background and foundation for moral discourse and action; and the failure of philosophy to provide what religion could no longer furnish was an important cause of philosophy losing its central cultural role and becoming a marginal, narrowly academic subject.

The Pursuit of Truth, Quine

2009-02-03T19:33:00.002-05:00

Quine on Evidence:

"From impacts on our sensory surfaces, we in our collective and cumulative creativity down the generations have projected our systematic theory of the external world. Our system is proving successful in predicting subsequent sensory input. How have we done it?" Pg. 1

"Not that prediction is the main purpose of science. One major purpose is understanding. Another is control and modification of the environment. Prediction can be purpose too, but my present point is that it is the test of a theory, whatever the purpose." Pg. 2

Quine on "Observation Sentences":

It should "command the subject's assent or dissent outright", and it should have "intersubjectivity: unlike a report of a feeling, the sentence must command the same verdict from all linguistically competent witnesses of the occassion." Otherwise, an observation sentence cannot provide evidential support for science. They are "occasion sentences: true on some occasions, false on others." "The requirement that it command a verdict outright is what makes it a final checkpoint. The requirement of intersubjectivity is what makes science objective." Pg. 3 -5

These sentences provide "the link between language, scientific or not, and the real world that language is all about." Pg. 5

"It is precisely [the] sharing of words, by observation sentences and theoretical sentences, that provides the logical connections between the two kinds of sentences and makes observation relevant to scientific theory. Retrospectively those once innocent observation sentences are theory-laden indeed...Seen holophrastically, as conditioned to stimulatory situations, the [observation] sentence is theory-free; seen analytically, word by word, it is theory-laden. Insofar as observation sentences bear on science at all, affording evidence and tests, there has to be this retrospective theory-lading along with the pristine holophrastic freedom from theory. To impugn their observationality thus retrospectively is to commit what Firth (p. 100) called the fallacy of conceptual retrojection." Pg. 7

"The scientist has a backlog of accepted theory, and is considering a hypothesis for possible incorporation into it." Pg. 9

"A generality that is compounded of observables in this way -- 'whenever this, that' -- is what I call an observation categorical...It is a generality to the effect that the circumstances described in the one observation sentence are invariably accompanied by those described in the other." Pg. 10

"Pure observation lends only negative evidence, by refuting an observation categorical that a proposed theory implies." Pg. 13 It can never provide proof of the truth asserted.

On Consistency with Backlog Theory:

The maxim of minimum mutilation: "the maxim constrains us, in our choice of what sentences of S [a set of purported truths] to rescind [after we are confronted with a failed observational categorical], to safeguard any purely mathematical truth; for mathematics infiltrates all branches of our system of the world, and its disruption would reverberate intolerably...[We have an] unstated policy of shielding mathematics by exercising freedom to reject other beliefs instead." Pg. 15

"Call an observation categorical analytic for a given speaker if, as in 'Robins are birds', the affirmative stimulus meaning for him of the one component is included in that of the other. Otherwise synthetic. Call a sentence or set of sentences testable if it implies some synthetic observation categoricals...Then the empirical content of a testable sentence or set of sentences for that speaker is the set of all the synthetic observation categoricals that it implies, plus all synonymous ones. I add the synonymous ones so that merely verbal variation will not obstruct sameness of content." Pg. 16-17

"I am of that large minority or small majority who repudiate the Cartesian dream of a foundation for scientific certainty firmer than the scientific method itself...I approach it as an input-output relation within flesh-and-blood denizens of an antecedently acknowledged external world, a relation open to inquiry as a chapter of the science of that world...I call the pursuit naturalized epistemology." Pg. 19

"Insofar as theoretical epistemology gets naturalized into a chapter of theoretical science, so normative epistemology gets naturalized into a chapter of engineering: the technology of anticipating sensory stimulation." Pg. 19

The watchword of empiricism: nihil in mente quod non prius in sensu. [me: this is not entirely true, insofar as Genes also record information about the world. A more precise watchword: information about the external world must be received to be got.]

Five virtues of hypothesis: conservatism, generality, simplicity, refutability, and modesty.

"A sentence's claim to scientific status rests on what in contributes to a theory whose checkpoints are in prediction." Pg. 20

On the possible collapse of empiricism if extra input by telepathy or revelation was discovered to be possible: "It is idle to bulwark definitions against implausible contingencies." Pg. 21

"True sentences, observational and theoretical, are the alpha and omega of the scientific enterprise." Pg. 31

"When we move beyond sensible bodies and proceed to posit atoms, electrons, quarks, numbers, classes, and relations, our imagination is bolstered by analogies in varying degrees. The insensible particles were easily taken in stride, as resembling sensible bodies except in size; but physics has been progressively sapping that analogy. Light waves rest on a tenuous analogy; unlike water waves, they are not waves on or in anything. The more tenuous these aids to the imagination, the less odd ontological relativity may seem. When we get to the positing of numbers and other abstract objects...we are indebted to some fruitful confusions along the way. Language and science are rooted in what good scientific language eschews. In Wittgenstein's figure, we climb the ladder and kick it away." Pg. 34-5.

"[W]ords can still be said to owe their meaning to their roles in sentences." pg. 37

"The quest for a clear and substantial notion of meaning should begin with an examination of sentences." Pg. 37

"Predicted utterances convey no news." Pg. 38

"In 'perceives that p' and 'believes that p' we have two among many idioms of propositional attitude." Pg. 67

"A neurological rendering of 'Tom perceives that it is raining', applicable to all such occasions merely on Tom's part, would already be formidable even if Tom's neural make-up were known in detail...further...a neurological rendering of 'perceives that it is raining', applicable to all comers, would be out of the question...Yet each perception is a single occurrence in a particular brain, and is fully specifiable in neurological terms once details are known. We cannot say the same for a belief, which can be publicly shared, but we can say somewhat the same for the instance of the belief in a single believer. The period during which I go on believing that the earth rotates is distinguished from my earlier stages by at least some verbal dispositions, which must reside in some distinctive quirks in my nervous system." Pg. 70-1

"Perceptions are neural realities, and so are the individual instances of beliefs and other propositional attitudes insofar as these do not fade out into irreality altogether...I acquiesce in what Davidson calls anomalous monism, also known as token physicalism: there is no mental substance, but there are irreducibly mental ways of grouping physical states and events. The keynote of the mental is not the mind; it is the content-clause syntax, the idiom 'that p'. Pg. 71

"Its irreducibility is all the more reason for treasuring it: we have no substitute. At the same time there is a good reason not to try to weave it into our scientific theory of the world to make a more comprehensive system. Without it science can enjoy the crystalline purity of extensionality: that is, the substitutivity of identiy and more generally the interchangeability of all coextensive terms and clauses, salva veritate...As long as extensional science can proceed autonomously and self-contained, with no gaps of causality that intensional intrusions could serve to close, the sound strategy is the linguistic dualism of anomalous monism." Pg. 71-2

He nonetheless encourages efforts "to reclaim territory from the intentional side...Whatever is thus reclaimed is better understood for the reclaiming." Pg. 72

"The sublimity of necessary truths turns thus not quite to dust, but to pretty common clay." Pg. 73

"Champions of modal logic mean necessity to have an objective sense, as if to say metaphysical necessity or physical necessity. But then it must make sense to think of a thing's essence, comprising those properties that it has necessarily." Pg. 74

"A similar second-order role is cut out, then, for 'possibly'. Since it simply means 'not necessarily not', 'possibly' marks its sentence as one that the beliefs or working assumptions of concerned parties do not exclude as false. Thanks to our overwhelming ignorance, the realm of possibility thus conceived is vaster far than that of necessity. It is the domain of all our plans and conjectures, all our hopes and fears." Pg. 74

"We see the archaic dominance of mentalism in a preference for final cause over efficient cause as a mode of explanation...This predilection for explanation by final cause is evident still today in people who seek the meaning of life. They want to explain life by finding its purpose." Pg. 75

"Necessity, then, would be a projection of the subjective sense of constraint, or abridgment of capability [possibility]." Pg. 75

Darwin reduced final cause in biology to efficient cause through his theory of natural selection. [me: unless there is, in the natural history (ontogeny) of selective outcomes, a common thread that characterizes and sorts the set of "biological entities", or even better, the set of "A-theoretical biological successes" -- something algorithmic.]

"'Fragile' and 'soluble' are physical predicates on a par with others, and the dispositional form of the words is just a laconic encoding of a relatively dependable test or symptom. Breaking on impact and dissolving on immersion are symptomatic of fragility and solubility." pg. 76

"What are true or false...are propositions."

Commenting on the Truth as Disquotation:

'Snow is white' is true if an only if snow is white.
To ascribe truth to the sentence is to ascribe whiteness to snow; such is the correspondence, in this example. Ascription of truth just cancels out the quotation marks. Truth is disquotation. Pg. 80

"Semantic ascent serves also outside of logic. When Einstein propounded relativity, disrupting our basic conceptions of distance and time, it was hard to assess it without leaning on our basic conceptions and thus begging the question. But by semantic ascent one could compare the new and old theories as symbolic structures, and so appreciate that the new theory organized the pertinent data more simply than the old. Simplicity of symbolic structures can be appreciated independently of those basic conceptions." Pg. 81

"The truth predicate is an intermediary between words and world. What is true is the sentence, but its truth consists in the world's being as the sentence says." Pg. 81

"One might accordingly relinquish the law of the excluded middle and opt rather for a three-valued logic, recognizing a limbo between truth and falsity as a third truth value...But a price is paid in the cumbersomeness of three-valued logic. Alongside 'not', which sends truths into falsehoods, falsehoods into truths, and now limbo into limbo, there would be a truth function that sends truths into limbo, limbo into falsehoods, and falsehoods into truths; also three more such one-place truth functions, playing out the combinations -- as contrasted with a single one, negation, in two-valued logic. When we move out to two-place truth functions (conjunction, alternation, and their derivatives), proliferation runs amok. It can still be handled, but there is an evident premium on our simple streamlined two-valued logic." Pg. 92

"The question that motivates the quest beyond disquotation can perhaps be phrased thus: if to call a sentence true is simply to affirm it, then how can we tell whether to affirm it?...The more sympathetic answer is a general analysis of the grounds of warranted belief, hence scientific method." pg. 93

"What the empirical under-determination of global science [i.e., there is insufficient possible evidence to clinch the system] shows is that there are various defensible ways of conceiving the world." Pg. 102

Moral Minds, Hauser, notes

2008-11-07T18:15:00.003-05:00

Everything henceforth is verbatim from the book, except for the comments in brackets. Those, happily or otherwise, are from me.
__________________________________________
Notes:

Marc D. Hauser, Moral Minds, HarperCollins Publishers, New York (2006).

Quotes Darwin, Descent of Man (1871), Chapter IV: "of all the differences between man and the lower animals, the moral sense or conscience is by far the most important. This sense, as Mackintosh*(2) remarks, "has a rightful supremacy over every other principle of human action"; it is summed up in that short but imperious word ought, so full of high significance. It is the most noble of all the attributes of man, leading him without a moment's hesitation to risk his life for that of a fellow-creature; or after due deliberation, impelled simply by the deep feeling of right or duty, to sacrifice it in some great cause."

Quotes David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature: "Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in ths particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of reason."

Quotes Noam Chomsky: "Why does everyone take for granted that we don't learn to grow arms, but rather, are designed to grow arms? Similarly, we should conclude that in the case of the development of moral systems, there's a biological endowment which in effect requires us to develop a system of moral judgment and a theory of justice, if you like, that in fact has detailed applicability over an enormous range."

"The central idea of this book is simple: we evolved a moral instinct, a capacity that naturally grows within each child, designed to generate rapid judgments about what is morally right or wrong based on an unconscious grammar of action."

"Facts alone don't motivate us into action."

"The only way to develop stable prescriptive principles, through either formal law or religion, is to understand how they will break down in the face of biases that Mother Nature equipped us with." pg 4

"Authority figures cannot mandate moral transgressions." pg 5 [me: but they can manipulate the operative parameters of particular situations to accomplish this result.]

"In our past, we were only presented with opportunities to help those in our immediate path: a hunter gored by a buffalo, a starving family member, an aging grandfather, or a woman with pregancy complications. There were no opportunities for altruism at a distance...Although there is no guarantee that we will help others in close proximity, the principles that guide our actions and omissions are more readily explained by proximity and probability." pg 10

"As the psychologist Jonathan Baron explains, intuition can lead to unfortunate or even detrimental outcomes...Once intuitions are elevated to rules, mind blindness turns to confabulation, as we engage in mental somersaults to justify our beliefs." Pg. 11, citing Baron's guidebook to intuition blindness (1994; 1998)

"Reasoning and emotion play some role in our moral behavior, but neither can do complete justice to the process leading up to moral judgment." Pg. 11

"[Lawrence] Kohlberg was right in thinking that conflict fuels the moral machinery." Pg. 19

"Hume's theory gets off the ground by looking at moral judgments through the lens of a three-party interaction: agent, receiver, and spectatory." Pg. 23

Quoting Hume: "Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them."

"Conscious moral reasoning often plays no role in our moral judgments, and in many cases reflects a post-hoc justification or rationalization of previously held biases or beliefs." Pg. 25

Quoting developmental psychologist Martin Hoffman: "[Empathy is] the spark of human concern for others, the glue that makes social life possible." Pg. 28

"We are like chameleons, designed to try out different colors to match our social partner's substrate." Pg. 29

"But rather than playing a role in generating a moral judgment, our emotions may function like wieghts, moving us to lean in one direction rather than another." Pg. 31

"We can unify and explain these ideas by appealing to the principle that it is permissible to cause harm as a by-product of achieving a greater good, but it is impermissible to use harm as a means to a greater good...the principle of double effect." Pg. 33 [me: this principle speaks to the fact that as spectators we are really judging the agent rather than the action-effect -- a sound discerning strategy that will, in the long run, make us the spectators better off, insofar as we must have future dealings with the agent.]

"It is not until about four years of age that children can maintain two different beliefs in mind and spontaneously flip between them." Pg. 34

"When it comes to language...what we express as our knowledge pales in relationship to the knowledge that is operative but unavailable to expression." Pg. 38

"The language faculty maintains a repository of principles for growing a language, any language...The problem of language acquisition is therefore like setting switches. Each child starts out with all possible switches, but with no particular settings; the environment thn sets them according to the child's native language." Pg. 38 [me: to ensure the "overlapping consensus", the centripetal 'unitary language", we must concern ourselves with setting switches.]

"When we speak about the language faculty, therefore, we are speaking about the normal, mature individual's competence with the principles that underlie their native language. What this individual chooses to say is a matter of performance, which will be influenced by whether she is tired, happy, in a fight with her lover, or addressing an audience of five hundred at a political rally." Pg. 39 [Me: radically local contingencies.]

"This boils down to a question of the child's initial state -- of her unconscious knowledge of linguistic principles prior to exposure to a spoken or signed language -- and the extent to which this state constrains not only what she learns and when, but what she can learn from listening or watching." Pg. 40 [Me: Initial boundary conditions, conditional algorithm, degrees of freedom.]

"To answer "How did it evolve?", we look to our history and recognize two distinctive parts: phylogeny and adaptation. A phylogeny analysis provides a depiction of the evolutionary relationships between species, yielding twiggy branches of the tree of life...To address the question of adaptation, we can look to the relationship between functional design and genetic success." [Me: the latter asks the question, what in fact did the moral faculty do for our selfish genes?]

Quoting Rawls: "There is no reason to assume that our sense of justice can be adequately characterized by familiar common sense precepts, or derived from the more obvious learning principles. A correct account of moral capacities will certainly involve principles and theoretical constructions which go beyond the norms and standards cited in every day life." Pg. 43, citing to (Rawls, 1971; pg. 46-47) [Me: the principles must derive from the "what for" -- i.e. they must be outside "morality".]

"Once an individual acquires his specific moral grammar, other moral grammars may be as incomprehensible to him as Chinese is to a native English speaker." Pg. 44 [all acquired moral languages come with opportunity costs: a decrease from the original degrees of freedom].

"Analyses of the motivation or intentions underlying an action, together with analyses of intended and foreseen consequences, provide the relevant material for our moral faculty. Emotions may only function to modulate what we actually do as distinct from what we comprehend or perceive as morally permissible." Pg. 46. [the importance of judgment not immediately acted upon: judgments can combine over time; they can amplify or dampen doubts and certitudes about specific agents or agent-types -- in essence coloring a person or role with an emotional prefix].

"Like phonemes, many actions lack meaning. When combined, actions are often meaningful. Like phonemes, when actions are combined, they do not blend; individual actions maintain their integrity. When actions are combine, they can represent an agent's goals, his means, and the consequences of his action or the omission of an action." Pg. 47 [me: meaning = distinguishability]

"To attain its limitless range of expressive power, the principles of our moral faculty must take a finite set of elements and recombine them into new, meaningful expressions of principles." Pg. 47

Citing Jonathan Haidt, "who proposes that we are equipped with four families of moral emotions: 1) other-condemning: contempt, anger, and disgust; 2) self-conscious: shame, embarrassment, guilt; 3) other-suffering: compassion; 4) other-praising: gratitude and elevation." Pg. 52

"Because the moral faculty relies on specialized brain systems, damage to these systems can lead to selective deficits in moral judgments. Damage to areas involved in supporting the moral faculty (e.g., emotions, memory) can lead to deficits in moral action - -of what individuals actually do, as distinct from what they think someone else should or would do." Pg. 54

"Morality regulates social interactions." Pg. 54

Quoting Thomas Henry Huxley (1860): "A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for a grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would rather be a man -- a man of restless and versatile intellect -- who, not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice." Pg. 60

"What has allowed us to live in large groups of unrelated individuals that often come and go is an evolved faculty of the mind that generates universal and unconscious judgments concerning justice and harm." Pg. 60 [Me: not exactly true. what has allowed this are expressed norms called Laws -- their relative harmony with contemporaneous morality, and their regular enforcement by authority.]

"Action at a distance generates a weaker altruistic pull, because we lacked the evolved psycholgoy. Helping individuals that are out of arm's reach, sometimes out of sight, is a newly developed pattern of action and interaction." Pg. 64 [me: manipulable by new media.]

"From a finite and often limited set of experiences, we project our intuitions to novel cases." Pg. 65 [me: problem of projection]

"Rawls's suggestion, building on the linguistic analogy, was that many of our morally relevant judgments emerge rapidly, often without reflection, in the absence of heated emotion, and typically, without access to a clear justification or explanation. Moreover, these judgments tend to be robust, as evidenced by the vehemence with which individuals stick to their intuitions in the face of reasonable alternative judgments." Pg. 67

"When people give explanations for their moral behavior, they may have little or nothing to do with the underlying principles. Their sense of conscious reasoning from specific principles is illusory. And even when someone becomes aware of an underlying principle, it is not obvious that this kind of understanding will alter their judgments in day-to-day interactions." Pg. 67 [me: thus, the goal is to use the empirical knowledge of the moral faculty to supplement it's raison d'etre: i.e., use it to inform Law.]

"If we reject [our innate moral principles], deciding that other principles are more consistent with our sense of justice, we must be prepared for conflict and instability." Pg. 70 [me: is this not the "ultimate cause" of our moral faculty -- i.e., the moderation of intragroup instability?]

"Once parameters are set, judgments of fairness may seem as incomprehensible across cultures as judgments of grammaticality for word order." Pg. 72 [me: if the psychology of justice exists because it is a successful environmental stabilizer, dissonant conceptions of justice are bastard mutations that do exactly the opposite.]

"As the mathematical biologists Martin Nowak and Karl Sigmund put it, 'The fiction of a rational "homo economicus" relentlessly optimizing material utility is giving way to "bounded rational" decision-makers governed by instincts and emotions.'" Pg. 79

"Mathematical models of this problem reveal that fairness evolves as a stable solution to the ultimatum game if proposers have access to information about a receiver's past behavior. When it comes to group level activity, reputation fuels cooperation and provides a shield against defection." Pg. 79

"In the fourteenth century, British villages repeatedly fell victim to the logic of the commons [Garrett Hardin's "tragedy of the commons"]. Each village was associated with a common pasture for their cattle and sheep. The pasture represented a shared resource. But since household wealth increased with the number of animals grazing on the pasture, the temptation to acquire more emerged. More animals meant more use of the pasture. More use of the pasture, less pasture. Less pasture, more competition. More competition, more strife. More strife, less village cohesion. Eventually, village after village dissolved." Pg. 81

"One way to maintain cooperative use of the land is to make resource use public knowledge. An individual's image or reputation can thus play a critical role in cooperation." Pg. 81 [me: thus, true cooperation is limited by group size, since the larger the group, the more diluted the impact of reputation regulation.]

"That individuals will pay to punish cheaters shows that moral indignation can fuel actions that are of immediate personal cost but of ultimate personal benefit as public goods accrue." Pg. 81

"The only way to guarantee stable, cooperative societies is by ensuring open inspection of reputation and providing opportunities for punishing cheaters." Pg. 81 [Me: communities, rather than "societies".]

"Although strong reciprocity is not selfish, it is strategic: only cooperate with those you can trust and nail those who are untrustworthy because they have cheated." Pg. 82

"The punisher's intent is not to convert. It is to make cheaters pay by excluding them from the circle of cooperators. It is to make explicit the difference between the in-group and out-group." Pg. 82

"Those who punish most are also those who contribute most in public goods games, which suggests that they have the most at stake, and have the greatest interest in maintaining the circle of cooperators; as expected, cheaters both contribute and punish least." Pg. 82 [me: calls to mind the international arena.]

Citing the studies of Norman Frohlich and Joe Oppenheimer: "Just as Rawls predicted, subjects readily settled on a principle of fairness. But the winning principle was not quite as Rawls predicted. No group selected the difference principle, where distribution is anchored by the worst off. Instead, groups settled on a principle that maximized the overall resources of the group while preventing the worst off from dropping below some preestablished level of income. This principle provides a safety net for those who are disadvantaged, for whatever reason, while allowing for extra benefits to flow toward those who contribute more to society." Pg. 88

"Attitudes toward these principles were high, and showed little change over the course of the experiment. However, when subjects had the freedom to choose, and vote unanimously, their satisfaction and confidence in the principle were significantly higher than when the same principle was imposed on them. The average-income [maximizing] -and-floor principle emerged as the clear winner. As a principle, it was stable after multiple iterations of the work-pay-redistribution cycle, but functioned to insill confidence in people, both those at the top and those on the floor. Contrary to many current political analyses, an income-distribution principle that allows for inequalities while taking care of those who are most in need does not reduce incentives to work hard, nor does it create a sink of free riders...Those who received from other players, and who actively participated in deciding the best principle, almost doubled their efforsts in order to contribute to the overall income. In contrast, those working under the same regime, but with the principle imposed, cheated and decreased their efforts, because they perceived redistribution through taxes as their right." Pg. 89 [Me: confidence, morale, increases stability and productivity.]

Referencing Daniel Kahneman's "prospect theory"-- i.e. the "anchoring effects of a reference point in our perception of fairness": "When we consider the value or utility of a resource, we do so in reference to our current state and the extent to which obtaining the resouce will significantly change this reference state...Fairness can therefore be assessed in terms of gains and losses relative to the individual's subjective experience of how good and bad things are right now...[this fact] mandates an understanding of current subjective experience in order to predict the utility of changing this state." Pg. 91-2

"Following Kahneman's lead, you consider the peak and end experience...We therefore make our judgments based on peak and end experiences, blind to overall duration." Pg. 94

"As Kahneman explains, 'Duration neglect remains a cognitive error...built deep into the structure of our tastes and is probably impossible to prevent...Intuition alone would not persuade us of the pitfalls of an evaluative memroy that each of us has trusted for a lifetime. and the intuitions evoked by carefully crafted thought experiments will not reliably yield correct predictions of the responses to cases seen in between-subjects designs. In short, I have tried to convince you that it could occasionally be useful to supplement philosophical intuition by the sometimes non-intuitive results of empirical psychological research.'" Pg. 94-5 [Me: on duration neglect: a bad situation that has a duration twice as long as another, equally bad situation will, due to this "cognitive error", be deemed "better" than the shorter equally bad situation if the end of the longer experience is better than the end of the shorter.]

"[The effectiveness of social norms] lies in their unconscious operation, and their power to create conformity." Pg. 97 [Me: consonant behavior rather than dissonant -- moderation of entropy.]

"An emotion's effectiveness relies upon two design features: automaticity and shielding from the meddling influences of our conscious, reflective, and contemplative thoughts about what ought to be." Pg. 98

Quoting Eric Posner: "In a world with no law and rudimentary government, order of some sort would exist. So much is clear from anthropological studies. The order woudl appear as routine compliance with social norms and collective infliction of sanctions on those who violate them, including stigmatization of the deviant and ostracism of the incorrigible. People would make symbolic commitments to the community in order to avoid suspicions about their loyalty. Also, people would cooperate frequently. They would keep and rely on promises, refrain from injuring their neighbors, contribute effort to public-spirited projects, make gifts to the poor, render assistance to those in danger, and join marches and rallies. But it is also the case that people would sometimes breach promises and cause injury. They would discriminate against people who, through no fault of their own, have become walking symbols of practices that a group rejects. They would have disputes, sometimes violent disputes. Feuds would arise and might never end. The community might split into factions. The order, with all its benefits, would come at a cost. Robust in times of peace, it would reveal its precariousness at moments of crisis." [Me: on the last, this is classic behavior of a self-organized dissipative system at criticality. dissolution and recombination.]

"When formal laws intervene, it is typically because the operative principles underlying a social norm cause harm to individuals." Pg. 99

"Once group size exceeds that of a typical hunter-gatherer group -- about 150 -- punishment is necessary, in one form or another, to preserve stable cooperation." Pg. 101

"[In the Ju/'hoansi], when the strong are punished, through mockery, pantomime, or criticism, they usually resort to self-mockery, which helps their reputation and maintains the egalitarian nature of the society." Pg. 102

"Scarlet-letter punishments -- as they are now called -- potentially solve two problems. They provide safety for the community by flagging its criminals and they deter future offenses by instilling shame, guilt, or fear." Pg. 105

"As philosopher Alvin Goldman points out, 'When punishment does not at least approximate giving satisfaction to the victims of crime and to those in the community who wish to demonstrate their moral outrage, these individuals will take it upon themselves to extract punishment instead of, or in addition to, that officially imposed. This would be likely to lead to an escalation of private vendettas, substituting the reigns of private terror for law and relative tranquility.'" Pg. 107 [Me: The amplification of entropy when the conceptions of justice become dissonant.]

"We must recognize the seductive power of seeing punishment in light of principles of fairness, and to design legal systems that indicate the pitfalls of this intuition, case by case. Legal systems, in turn, must recongize that if they go against people's tastes for punishment, they may create more problems, as individuals seek revenge and take the law into their own hands." Pg. 107 [Me: the psychology of justice is a first-order constraint on the general problem of social cohesion, and social cohesion is a first-order imperative of Law and the art of system-maintenance. All theories of punishment must be sublimated into this first-order imperative of the Self-Regarding Ourworld.]

"When Petrinovich's scenarios revealed information about identity, then subjects saved kin over non-kin, friends over strangers, humans over nonhumans, and politically safe or neutral individuals over politically abhorrent monsters." Pg. 122-3

"Killing is wrong if it is intended as a means to some end. Killing is permissible if it is an unintended but a foreseen by-product of a greater good." Pg. 125

"Our experience with these dilemmas influences our judgments, the impact on judgment does not translate into our justifications and ability to access the underlying principles, and there appear to be people who for unknown reasons are more likely to judge certain situations as permissible or impermissible." Pg. 131 [Me: the heteroglossia, not only of judgments but also of preparednesses, is a clear signal that the moral instinct is an imprecise instrument with which to pursue the precisely defined goals of living-system maintenance: indefinite cohesion, covalence, and complexity.]

"The best predictor of violence is the number of unmarried young men!" Pg. 132

"Our violence imposes constraints on the pattern of violence, allowing for some options but not others; which options are available and selected depends upon prior history and current conditions. As...Margo Wilson and Martin Daly suggest, 'dangerous competitive violence reflects the activation of a risk-prone mindset that is modiulated by present and past cues of one's social and material success, and by some sort of mental model of the current local utility of competitive success both in general and in view of one's personal situation...[such as] ecological factors that affect resource flow stability and expected life span." Pg. 132

"Cultures of honor also showcase the economic notion of discounting...they discount the future, and the temptation for immediate gratification rules them." Pg. 136

[Stanley] Milgram's studies show [that] obedience to authority is universal, but the degree to which authority rules varies between cultures." Pg. 140

"[A]ttitudes can...force a shift from the descriptive level of what is to a prescriptive level of what ought to be. Southerners not only respond with violence to insult. They think this is what people ought to do." Pg. 141

"[Alan] Gibbard's intuition is that there are also emotional norms--apt feelings--that lead to particularly relevant and appropriate actions--wise choices." Pg. 153Citing to Wise Choices and Apt Feelings, and the biological notion of norm of reaction.

[A]cknowledging...observed variation does not constitute a rejection of constraints." Pg. 166

"When an action violates expectation, a negative emotion often ensues. Negative emotions are aversive. I propose that one branch of the root of our moral judgments can be found in the nature of expectation concerning action." Pg. 168 [me: paradigmatic crisis, aversion to uncertainty.]

"What adults say is the morally right or wrong thing to do may be different from what they would actually do in the same situation. And for both their judgment and their actions, they may have little understanding of the underlying principles." Pg. 171

"[H]ow we divide an event into pieces depends on our familiarity with the event." pg. 181

"Self-knowledge is a prophylactic." Pg. 183

"Emotions work like well-designed engines, propelling us in different directions depending upon the task at hand...Our emotions are thus biasing agents that work together with our perceptions of planned or perceived action." Pg. 188

"Empathy is...a matching up of emotions in the displayer and observer." Pg. 194

"Disgust carries two other features that make it a particularly effective social emotion: It enjoys a certain level of immunity from conscious reflection, and it is contagious like yawning and laughter." Pg. 198

"Like visual illusions, when our sensory systems detect something disgusting, we avoid it even if we consciously know that this is irrational and absurd. Disgust engages an automated sequence of actions that leads to tactical evasion." Pg. 199

"To engage with any moral dilemma, it is necessary to imagine one world in which an action is take and consequences follow, and a second world, where no action is taken and a different set of consequences follow." Pg. 203

"The capacity to wait, exert patience, and fend off temptation is a core part of the support team associated with our moral faculty." Pg. 214

"The child's genome generaly creates a style of engaging with the world that either internalizes or externalizes actions. Children presenting the internalist signature take greater responsibility for what happens...The signature of an externalist is exactly opposite. When someone offers ice cream, it is because the person offering is nice [rather than the ice cream was deserved]." Pg. 215

"Self-control predicts the tendency to trangress the unstated rule." Pg. 216

"The number of seconds a two-year-old waits is like a crystal ball that predicts her future moral behavior; her ethical style, if you will. Watch how long she delays gratification, and you can extrapolate what she will be like as an adolescent and even a thirtysomething...These studies suggest that impatience or impulsivity on the delayed-gratification task is an excellent predictor of who will trangress the mores of the culture." Pg. 216

"These results show that a child's capacity to wait for something good sets boundaries or constraints on her capacity to be nice to others." Pg. 217

"This variability [between control and impulsivity] doesn't influence our moral judgments, but it does influence our moral behavior." Pg. 218

"Unambiguously, when people confront certain kinds of moral dilemmas, they activate a vast network of brain regions, including areas involved in emotion, decision-making, conflict, social relations, and memory." Pg. 222

"For a full-fledged utilitarian, Frank-on-the-footbridge isn't a moral dilemma at all. There is no conflict (anterior cingulate isn't engaged), no competing duties (no voice from the limbic system), simply one and only one choice: push the heavy man and save five people. Solving Frank's dilemma is like judging whether the inequality 1< 5 is true." Pg. 222-3

"Unambiguously, all of the imaging studies to date show that the areas involved in emotional processing are engaged when we deliver a moral judgment, especially cases that are personally charged." Pg. 223

On the mirror neuron system: "Neurons in the premotor crotex show the same level of activity when the individual reaches for an object as when he watches someone else do the same, or when the individual hears a sound associated with an action or performs the same action himself...[R]ecent studies suggest that part of this system turns on when we directly experience a disgusting event or observe someone else experiencing the disgust, with parallel findings for the experience of pain and empathy toward others in pain." Pg. 224-5

"Patients with damage to the frontal lobes...fail to integrate their emotions into their rational deliberations, [in fact], they appear to operate without ever consulting their emotion." Pg. 227 See Antonio Damasio's tests on "emotional temperature" by reading skin sweat.

"When everything is working properly, our emotions function like hunch generators, a flittering of unconscious expectations that guide long-term decisions." Pg. 228

"If the frontal lobes malfunction, an inappropriate decision is likely to follow due to a general insensitivity to consequences." Pg. 229

"Social conventions are relatively flat emotionally, whereas moral conventions--and especially their trangressions--are emotionally charged." Pg. 238

"This suggests that moral rules consist of two ingredients: a prescriptive theory or body of knowledge about what one ought to do, and an anchoring set of emotions." Pg. 238

"[T]here is evidence that emotions can shift events from conventional to moral." Pg. 240

"[Shaun] Nichols's study raises the interesting possibility that norms acquire their robustness when they are tied to strong emotions. Upholding such norms makes people feel good, while violations make them feel bad, ridden with guild, shame, or embarrassment." Pg. 240e can immediately see why emotions are nature's best strategy for behavioral regulation.]

"Amotz Zahavi argued that signals are honest if and only if they are costly to produce, if the costs are proportional to the signaler's current condition (e.g., the same signal is costlier to produce fro an individual in poor rather than good condition), and if signaling ability is heritable, passed on genetically from parents to offspring." Pg. 247

"Crying, especially with tears, qualifies as a "handicap". It is difficult to produce on command, costly in terms of energy and the blurring of vision, and is the only emotional expression to leave an enduring physical trace after the initial incident." Pg. 247

Quoting Rawls: "Therefore one might conjecture that the capacity to act from the more universal forms of rational benevolence is likely to be eliminated, whereas the capacity to follow the principles of justice and natural duty in relations between groups and individuals other than kin would be favored." Pg. 252

Me: Moralizing the rule of law is an excellent strategy of Ourworld.

"s a species, we are born with two quantificational systems, innate machinery that enables infants to compute small numbers precisely and large numbers approximately." Pg. 256

"Thus, infants discriminated four from eight, and eight from sixteen objects, but not four from six, or eight from twelve." Pg. 256

"The development of a large precise number system does not dependon language in general. It depends on words for numbers specifically." Pg. 257 [Me: if we are interested in more precise constraints, rather than approximate and diverse judgments, where do we look to for "moral words"? Law, in its prescriptive and punishment capacity, gives us the precise normative vocabulary.]

"Results showed that for the individual receiving fewer stickers, even the youngest children immediately stated that the distribution was unfair...For children receiving more stickers, a different pattern of response emerged: they seemed perfectly content with the situation. Of considerable interest, especially in terms of the competence of chldren's intuitions about fairness as opposed to their performance or what they would do if they had been in charge of distribution, is the observation that children raarely gve coherent explanations or justifications." Pg. 258-9

Quoting Richard Alexander: "Indirect reciprocity involves reputation and status, and results in everyone in a social group continually being assesed and reassessed by interactants, past and potential, on the basis of their interactions with others." Pg. 259

"[O]ur moral facultyis sensitive to contingencies, if-then rules, that allow for exceptions to moral rules about what is or isn't forbidden. These competencies emerge early, presumably in every child, and without the help of teachers, parents, and other sages." Pg. 266

"The path from competence--recognizing a trangression--to performance--doing something about it--may not line up as parallel or integrated paths. Other faculties may intervene..." Pg. 269

"Once again, a rigid deontological stance is problematic, because it is sometimes permissible to lie, breaking a promise to keep a secret. The intention of the liar and promise-breaker is essential." Pg. 270 [Me: again, the judgment is of the social value of the agent.]

"Cosmides and Tooby's insight was that our minds evolved the capacity to solve socially relevant problems, such as detecting cheaters who violate rules." Pg. 274

[They] have mounted an impressive amount of evidence to support their claim that problems involving social contracts tap a specialization that is present in all human beings...Social contracts, whether stated over a beer or written in legalese, are commitments. They engage trust. Violating them engages distrust and a cascade of emotions designed to enhance vigilance and catalyze retribution." pg. 276 [Me: trust is a therefore a key indicator of cohesion. How do you augment social trust?]

"Dan Sperber and... Vittorio Girotto argue that people's performance greatly improves when there is some kind of payoff to finding the violation, and where the context's relevance depends on understanding the speaker's intent--what he or she wishes to convey." Pg. 277

"[The] brain is running different reasoning software for social contracts and precautions." Pg. 279

Quoting Dorothy Sayers: "Envy is the great leveler: if it cannot level things up, it will level them down...rather than have anyone happier than itself, it will se us all miserable together." Pg. 282

"Envy is useful, serving a key role in survival, motivating achievement, serving the conscience of self and other, and alterting us to inequities that, if fueled, can lead to escalated violence." Pg. 283

Quoting Shakespeare's Henry VI: "When Envy breeds unkind division, there comes the ruin, there begins confusion." Pg. 283

Quoting Oscar Wilde: "Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality."

"[Many] have stressed the importance of emotions in stabilizing cooperative relationships and anchoring commitment. Emotions provide an involuntary mechanism for creating the equivalent of a binding contract." Pg. 285

"Guilt is often triggered when we cheat and recognize the consequences of the act. But guilt may also play a stabilizing role, reversing an instability caused by deception...those who admittedly feel guilty are more likely to cooperate in future rounds [of the ultimatum game]." Pg. 286

"When reciprocity fails or the offer is unfair, imaging studies reveal significant activation of the anterior insula, an address of the brain known to play a role in negative emotions such as pain, distress, anger, and especially disgust. How interesting that cheaters might be considered disgusting. Equally interesting is the fact that wehn subjects engage in altruistic punishment, paying a personal cost in order to impose a larger cost on someone else, the punisher experiences relief and satisfaction, evidenced by activation of the caudate nucleus, a key center for processing rewarding experiences. When we punish, our brains secretly relish the experience." Pg. 287

Quoting Helena Antipoff: "What we have is an affective perception of justice."

"The universal moral grammar is a theory about the suite of principles and parameters that enable humans to build moral systems." Pg. 300

"One signature of an innate faculty is a narrow time window for expressing a skill that is relatively immune to differences in experience." Pg. 303

Quoting Rousseau: "Nature lays her commands on every animal, and the brute obeys her voice. Man receives the same impulsion, but at the same time knows himself at liberty to acquiesce or resist."

"From the gene's-eye view, the way to think about the evolution of moral behavior is to think selfishly." Pg. 311

"Natural selection builds organisms with complex design features based on nonrandom but directionless process." [Me: the non-random comes about because computational prowess is the difference between success and failure.]

"Conflict is associated with stress, reconciliation with the reduction of stress...when conflict is followed by a peace offering, heart rate and cortisol levels drop, as do accompanying behavioral correlates of stress." Pg. 330

References John Conway's program of Life.

"Yawning is generally contagious. But it is really contagious if you have a big heart, unable to turn off your compassion for others." Pg. 352

"We are the only animal that cooperates on a large scale with genetically unrelated individuals and that consistently shows stable reciprocity, exchanging within the same market currencies or different ones." Pg. 378

"By-product mutualism arises when the outcome of an act benefits both participants." Pg. 380 [Me: covalence]

Timing of benefits can be the difference between stable and unstable systems of cooperation.

Quoting Rawls: "Social cooperation is distinct from merely socially coordinated activity--for example, activity coordinated by orders issued by an absolute central authority. Rather, social cooperation is guided by publicly recognized rules and procedures which those cooperating accept as appropriate to regulate their conduct." [Me: coordination speaks to cohesion, while cooperation speaks to covalence.]

"[T]he significant variation between human groups creates an opportunity for group selection." Pg. 416 [me: with the same universal standard of success: relative computational prowess, useful complexity.]

The utilitarian takes as his "central tenet that we evaluate moral dilemmas in terms of consequences." Pg. 418 [Me: In fact, we evaluate moral dilemmas because it's necessary for a social being, who derives evolutionary advantage from group integrity and functionality, to be able to compute the value of agents; moral judgments are our way of branding informative prefixes on agents, agent-types, and meaningful circumstance.]

"The systems that generate intuitive moral judgments are often in conflict with the systems that generate principled reasons for our actions, because the landscape of today only dimly resembles our original state." Pg. 418

Positivism

2008-07-09T18:30:00.002-05:00

Richard von Mises, Positivism notes:

"Presumably the reader knows what he would regard as a reasonable or judicious attitude in most situations of life. No doubt a major component of such an attitude is, in the first place, to judge on the grounds of experience, that is, the rememberance of the contingencies of one's own life and the knowledge of those of others. Furthermore, such an attitude requires a continual readiness to give up a judgment once made or to change it if new experiences require. It also implies a lack of prejudice, superstition, obstinacy, blind trust in authority, mystical thinking, fanaticism."

"As a first tentative and quite rough approach to the definition of positivism, we may say that whoever, when confronted with any practical or theoretical problem, acts as we have just described it, is a positivist."

"No procedure based on systematic observations from which conclusions may be drawn is declined to positivism . . . Even less than the method are the subject matter and the aim of research subject to limitations from the standpoint of positivism."

On things antipositivistic: "First of all is the idea that there exists an area of problems in which the intellect is not 'competent,' in which one cannot think or must not think. Next is the conception that there exists a realm of 'truth' which cannot be shaken by any experience, previous or future." [Cf. Wittgenstein: "Things which cannot be said we must pass over in silence."]

"It is the aim of positivistic theory to review and to sum up the stock of experience acquired by men in a uniform picture so that mutually consistent judgments are possible in all situations in life." [Me: Positivism is the correct approach to the intersubjective Weltanschauung, the shared theory of Ourworld.]

"The first and greatest difficulty in striving for reasonable judgments and in constructing a consistent world picture lies in language."

"All school philosophers from Plato through Kant and Hegel to Jusserl and Heidegger have tried to solve the unsolvable problem of deriving a consistent world image by using (and slightly modifying) the stock of ready-made expressions in their language. Present-day logical positivism (which has had rather early predecessors, too) starts from the fact that the 'logic' stored in our language represents a primitive stage of science. The positivist, like everybody else, has to use colloquial language in order to make himself understood; but he uses it critically. He knows that all terms in use are conventions which refer to a limited area of experience and beyond that mean nothing."

"For the positivist, ever word, every phrase, of colloquial language means a dissection of the world into three classes. The first class consists of things or situations to which the word, according to the existing linguistic conventions, applies without any doubt. The second class comprises those things for which the word in question is definitely not meant; and the third is formed by all those phenomena for which the linguistic conventions are not sufficient to enable one to decide whether or not the given expression applies." [Me: Core + Periphery]"

"The metaphysicians attitude toward language is entirely different. He thinks that a word, e.g., the word 'justice,' corresponds, independently of all conventions, to some specific entity, and he seeks to discover this entity, i.e., to find the 'true' and correct definition of justice. To the positivist the question 'What is justice?' can mean only one of two things. Either one wants to find out what in the course of time was denoted by this word within different cultural areas (historical semantics), or one seeks, with a specific aim in mind, to fix a new concept of justice, that is to say, to suggest a new linguistic convention for use within some limited field of action or of science."

"Wittgenstein shows that the theorems of pure mathematics or of logic say absolutely nothing about reality (about the experienceable, observable world), but are, in a specific sense of the word, tautologies . . . Theorems of logic or pure mathematics are said to be 'correct' if they are in agreement with the system of accepted definitions and rules, just as in chess only those moves are accepted which are in accordance with the rules of the game."

"The symbols and transformation rules of logic correspond as an approximation to certain facts and relations of everyday life." [Me: Their appearance of accuracy is scale-dependent. See also "Detection and Emergence": "Emergence can then be defined with respect to the same tools used to define the complexity of a system. It occurs when an object or phenomenon cannot be detected or understood with a given set of tools but can be detected or understood by allowing some additional tools. For some reason (dynamic evolution of the system or changes in the set of observational tools) a new apprehension of the system becomes possible that offers a shorter overall description, and hence a smaller relative complexity. Emergence is thus associated with a decrease of the relative complexity.]

"Our answer to the Kantian problem of epistemology is therefore this: One can construct in many ways tautological systems in which there exist -- according to fixed rules -- absolutely correct statements; but if one wants to state anything about relations between observable phenomena, e.g., in astronomy, then one is subject to control by future experiences. The application of mathematical methods can never guarantee the correctness of a nonmathematical proposition."

"But we [positivists] also observe that metaphysicians make propositions which are framed in such a way that they neither form parts of an established tautological system nor are testable in experience."

"We do not claim that a scientific theory, either in physics, or in economics, or in any other field, is uniquely determined by the observable facts. Theories are inventions, constructions. A theory is useful if it predicts the phenomena correctly. Different theories may make the same predictions with respect to large areas of facts. Under otherwise equal circumstances one will prefer that theory which covers a larger field of phenomena or which from some point of view appears to be 'simpler.'" [me: prefer one whose terms are definitionally connected to all other theories.]

"Experience teaches that all theories are constantly subject to larger or smaller modifications and that, as Ernst Mach expressed it, science consists of a continually progressing adaptation of ideas to facts."

"Since the time of Ernst Mach, natural scientists have known that the explanation or the theory of a group of phenomena is only a description of the facts on a higher level."

"It is always the search for, and the exposition of, typical and recurring elements within the unique course of the world that is the subject of science."

"The aim of intellectual endeavor of man may in the last analysis consist in the attempt to arrive, for all phenomena that are of some interest, at a description that is connectible across the boundaries of all fields . . . In the meantime, the gaps are filled by nonscientific theories, i.e., theories that are not connectible with the language of science. They appear in the form of metaphysics or of religious systems or of poetry."

"If an engineer computes the relation between the dimensions of the girders of a bridge and the load that the bridge can stand, he can phrase the result in the form: The bridge must have these dimensions . . . the connection between statements of fact and the ought-sentences derived from them is evident. We can formulate it thus: Ought-sentences are elliptic statements; they suppress one part of the implication."

"A justification of a prescription can only consist of statements that express the relation between the prescribed conduct and certain consequences . . . no useful purpose is served if one tries to mislead oneself or others about the fact that all moral systems, including their justifications, are creations of the human intellect of a similar kind to scientific theories."

"Positivism does not claim that all questions can be answered rationally, just as medicine is not based on the premise that all diseases are curable, or physics does not start out with the postulate that all phenomena are explicable. But the mere possibility that there may be no answers to some questions is no sufficient reason for not looking for answers or for not using those that are attainable."

Charles Bennett, Definition of Organization and Complexity

2008-06-11T16:05:00.001-05:00

Bennett: there is a difference between dissipation (irreversible net increase in entropy) and reversible transfers of entropy.
: "it is usually more practical to stop a moving car with breaks than by saving its kinetic energy in a flywheel."
: Neurons have poor efficiency, dissipating about 10^11 kT per discharge, explained by macroscopic size.
: On the other hand, the molecular apparatus of DNA replication, transcription and protein synthesis, whose components are truly microscopic, has a realatively high energy efficiency, dissipating 20-100 kT per nucleotide or amino acid inserted under physiological conditions.

: In the modern world view, thermodynamic driving forces, such as the temperature difference between the hot sun and the cold night sky, have taken over one of the functions of God: they make matter transcend its clod-like nature and behave instead in dramatic and unforseen ways, for example molding itself into thunderstorms, people, and umbrellas.
: Organization defined as "logical depth", a notion based on algorithmic information and computational time complexity.
: Logical depth is the number of steps in the deductive or causal path connecting a thing with its plausible origin.
: Candidates for definitions of "organization" and "complexity" can be divided into those based on function and those based on structure.

: In spite of the well-known ability of dissipative systems to lower their entropy at the expense of their surroundings, flouting the spirit of the second law while they obey its letter, organization cannot be directly identified with thermodynamic potentials such as entropy or free energy: the human body is intermediate in entropy between a crystal and a gas...
: Subjective organization seems to obey a "slow growth law" which states that, except by a lucky accident, organization cannot increase quickly in any deterministic or probabilistic process, but it can increase slowly...This in turn, means that subjective organization is not additive: 1 bacterium contains much more organization than 0 bacteria, but 2 sibling bacteria contain about the same as 1.
: an object's information content is the number of bits required to specify it uniquely -- as distinction, as a "self-contained unity" (Rosenzweig, pg. 11)
FN (on "The new world Nietzsche unlocked to reason, beyond the orbit described by ethics."): "Now a self-contained unity rebelled against this totality which encloses the All as a unity, and extorted its withdrawal as a singularity, as the singular life of the singular person. The All can thus no longer claim to be all: it has forfeited its uniqueness." Pg. 11
FN (Lebensanschauung vs. Weltanschauung): "One must acknowledge the otherworldliness of the new inquiry as against everything which the concept of ethics hitherto solely meant and solely was meant to mean, the more so if one wants the spiritual achievement of the past to count for everything which it accomplishd rather than to destroy it in a riot of blind destructiveness. A way of looking at life (Lebensanschauung) confronts a way of looking at the world (Weltanschauung). Ethics is and remains a part of the Weltanschauung. Its special relationship with a life-focused point of view is only that of a particularly intimate contradiction, just because both seem to touch each other, indeed repeatedly claim mutually to solve the problems of the other together with their own. It remains to be shown in what sense this is actually the case. But the contrast of the life-centered and the world-centered points of view comes down so sharply to a contrast with the ethical portion of the world-centered view that one is inclined to designate questions of the life view as veritably meta-ethical." pg. 11
[Me: Lebensanschauung = Myworld, Weltanschauung = Ourworld]

Rosenzweig, Introduction to Star of Redemption

2008-06-11T15:58:00.001-05:00

Franz Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, Translated by William Hallo.

"Philosophy takes it upon itself to throw off the fear of things earthly, to rob death of its poisonous sting, and Hades of its pestilential breath." p.3
Me: Philosophy seeks to find, perceive, conceive something, anything, eternal; something immutable, immovable, unassailable. It then seeks to unconceal our relationship to this eternality, and, belatedly, my relationship to it and to us. Philosophy seeks a cosmically atomic aletheia. Whether this "bears us over the grave which yawns at our feet with every step" is besides the point, a secondary effect, a consequence, if that, of the search for safe harbor and dry land -- i.e., the search for certainty.

"Let man creep like a worm into the folds of the naked earth before the fast approaching volleys of a blind death from which there is no appeal; let him sense there, forcibly, inexorably, what he otherwise never senses: that his I would be but an It if it died; let him therefore cry his very I out with every cry that is still in his throat against Him from whom there is no appeal, from whom such unthinkable annihilation threatens -- for all this dire necessity philosophy has only its vacuous smile." p. 3
Me: True. Philosophy's embarrassment is that it can do nothing to alleviate the fact and fear of my ultimate annihilation; the fact and fear of eternal Nothingness before and after, of noise and noiselessness, of life well- or ill-spent but spent, of presence dissipating and diluting into past, to be ultimately lost and forgotten by a mindless, purposeless, unavailing and unobliging universe.

"For man does not really want to escape any kind of fetters; he wants to remain, he wants to -- live." p. 3

"It is presumably necessary for man to disengage once in his life. Like Faust, he must for once bring the precious vial down with reverence; he must for once have felt himself in his fearful poverty, loneliness, and dissociation from all the world, have stood a whole night face to face with the Nought." p. 4

"A way out of the bottleneck of the Nought has been determined for him, another way than this precipitate fall into the yawning abyss. Man is not to throw off the fear of the earthly; he is to remain in the fear of death -- but he is to remain." p. 4

"He is to remain. He shall do none other than what he already wills: to remain. The terror of the earthly is to be taken from him only with the earthly itself." p. 4
Me: A poor trade only if there is more to life than terror and pain.

"Only the singular can die and everything mortal is solitary. Philosophy has to rid the world of what is singular, and this undoing of the Aught is also the reason why it has to be idealistic...And it is the ultimate conclusion of this doctrine that death is -- Nought. But in truth this is no ultimate conclusion, but a first beginning, and truthfully death is not what it seems, not Nought, but a something from which there is no appeal, which is not to be done away with. Its hard summons sounds unbroken even out of the mist with which philosophy envelops it...And man's terror as he trembles before this sting ever condemns the compassionate lie of philosophy as cruel lying." p. 4-5

"Philosophy plugs up its ears before the cry of terrorized humanity. Were it otherwise, it would have to start from the premise, the conscious premise, that the Nought of death is an Aught, that the Nought of every new death is a new Aught, ever newly fearsome, which neither talk nor silence can dispose of. It would need the courage to listen to the cry of mortal terror and not to shut its eyes to gruesome reality...A thousand deaths stand in the somber background of the world as its inexhaustible premise..." p. 5

"We want no philosophy which joins death's retinue and deceives and diverts us about its enduring sovereignty by the one-and-all music of its dance. We want no deception at all." p. 5

On Kierkegaard: "This consciousness neither needed a blending into the cosmos nor admitted of it, for even if everything about it could be translated into universal terms, there remained the being saddled with first and last name, with what was his own in the strictest and narrowest sense of the word. And this 'own' was just what mattered, as the bearers of such experience asserted." p. 7
Me: What do I care if my 'energy' rejoins some cosmic stream? Or if my 'soul' gets reincarnated memorylessly. The silt, the 'detritus' left behind, will be "me", will be just what mattered to me.

"Schopenhauer was the first of the great thinkers to inquire, not into the essence but into the value of the world...This man no longer philosophized in the context of, and so to say as if commissioned by, the history of philosophy, nor as heir to whatever might be the current status of its problems, but 'had taken it upon himself to reflect on life' because it -- life -- 'is a precarious matter.' ... He declares the content of philosophy to be the idea with which an individual mind reacts to the impression which the world has made on him....Man, 'life,' had become the problem, and he had 'taken it upon himself' to solve it in the form of philosophy." p. 8

On Nietzsche: "Poets had always dealt with life and their own souls. But not philosophers. And saints had always lived life and for their own soul. But again -- not the philosophers. Here, however, was one man who knew his own life and his own soul like a poet, and obeyed their voice like a holy man, and who was for all that a philosopher." p. 9
Me: A pointed, and almost certainly intended, irony; Nietzsche wrote in Ecce Homo, "I have a terrible fear that some day one will pronounce me holy."

More: "For the great thinkers of the past, the soul had been allowed to play the role of, say, wet nurse, or at any rate of tutor of Mind. But one day the pupil grew up and went his own way, enjoying his freedom and unlimited prospects. He recalled the four narrow walls in which he had grown up only with horror. Thus mind enjoyed precisely its being free of the soulful dullness in whch nonmind spends its day...For Nietzsche this dichotomy between height and plain did not exist in his own self: he was of a piece, soul and mind a unity, man and thinker a unity to the last." p. 9

"Philosophy ceased to be a negligible quantity for his philosophy. Philosophy had promised to give him compensation in the form of mind in return for selling it his soul, and he no longer took this compensation seriously. Man as philosophizer had become master of philosophy...philosophy had to acknowledge him, acknowledge him as something which it could not comprehend but which, because powerful over against it, it could not deny. Man in the utter singularity of his individuality, in his prosopographically determined being, stepped out of the world which knew itself as the conceivable world, out of the All of philosophy." p. 10
Me: Heidegger, in his lecture "The Way Back into the Ground of Metaphysics", writes: "Insofar as a thinker sets out to experience the ground of metaphysics...his thinking has in a sense left metaphysics. From the point of view of metaphysics, such thinking goes back into the ground of metaphysics. But what still appears as ground from this point of view is presumably something else, once it is experienced in its own terms -- something as yet unsaid, according to which the essence of metaphysics, too, is something else and not metaphysics."
Me: This relates to Godel's essay "What Is Cantor's Continuum Problem?", where he writes: "But despite their remoteness from sense experience, we do have something like a perception of the objects of set theory, as is seen from the fact that the axioms force themselves upon us as being true. I don't see any reason why we should have less confidence in this kind of perception, i.e., in mathematical intuition, than in sense percpetion, which induces us to build up physical theories and to expect that future sense perceptions will agree with them." This is a weak claim; there is no reason why we should have "less" confidence, rather than the strong claim that confidence in either is justified by and after a finer-grained resolution of the problem.
Me: Thus, underlying the systematic reasoning of Heidegger's animal rationale (which is inseparable in fact from the animal metaphysicum) are truths that can only be intuited, perceived, experienced as truths which force themselves upon us; logically ineffable, formally irreducible, describable only indirectly, metaphorically, sensationally, if at all.
Me: This also tracks Quine and his "blending of analytic and synthetic, empirical and metaphysical [intuitional] knowledge" into a type of epistemic pragmatism. As Godel writes:
"Evidently, the 'given' underlying mathematics is closely related to the abstract elements contained in our empirical ideas (e.g., the idea of object itself). It by no means follows, however, that the data of this second kind, because they cannot be associated with actions of certain things upon our sense organs, are something purely subjective, as Kant asserted. Rather they, too, may represent an aspect of objective reality, but, as opposed to the sensations, their presence may be due to another kind of relationship between ourselves and reality."

"One has always realized the 'contingency of the world,' its state of 'that's the way it is.' But the point is that this contingency had to be mastered. In fact, this was precisely the function of philosophy. In the process of being thought about, the contingent changes itself into something necessary...There is, to put it very crudely, a nonidentity of being and reasoning which has to show itself in being and reasoning themselves. It cannot be harmonized by a third party, will, stepping in as a deus ex machina which is neither being nor reasoning." p. 12

"Reason is entitled to a home in the world, but the world is just that: a home; it is not totality...Thus the world is beyond as against what is intrinsically logical, as against unity. The world is not alogical; on the contrary, logic is an essential component of the world, rather literally, as we shall see, its 'essential' component. It is not alogical, but, to use the term coined by Ehrenberg, metalogical." p. 13-14

"For the world, truth is not law but content. It is not that truth validates [bewahrt] reality, but reality preserves [bewahrt] truth. The essence of the world is this preservation (not validation) of truth. "Outwardly" the world thus lacks the protection which truth had accorded to the All from Parmenides to Hegel. Since it shelters its truth in its lap, it does not present such a Gorgon's shield of untouchability to the outside. It has to expose its body to whatever may have happened to it, even if that should be its--creation. Yes, we might well grasp the concept of the world in this new metalogical sense rather completely if we would venture to address the world as creature." p.14-15

"Logic and ethics had once, it seemed, been locked in ceaseless combat for pre-eminence: metalogic, however, left room beside itself for metaethics. The world as a multiplicity united into an individual unicum and man, by nature an individual unicum, now confronted each other and they could breathe side by side." p.15

"Metaethical man is the leaven which causes the logico-physical unity of the cosmos to fall apart into the metalogical world and the metaphysical God." p.16: The science of God is called metaphysics.

"That the metalogical concept of the world succumbed to, say, confusion with the concept of nature was equally unavoidable...For if metaethical man, in spite of that designation, could be equated with the moral personality, then there remained for the metalogical cosmos only the equation with the critical concept of nature." p.16

"We sought to distinguish...our concept of the world from the critical concept of nature...[encompassing] on principle all the possible contents of a philosophical system, provided only they meet one condition: they are to appear as elements not of 'the' but only of 'an' All." p.17

"The metaethical in man makes man the free master of his ethos so that he might possess it and not vice versa. The metalogical in the world makes the logos a 'component' of the world entirely emptied into the world, so that it might possess the logos and not vice versa. Just so, the metaphysical in God makes physis a 'component' of God." p.17

"Philosophy fed theology on the identity of reasoning and being as a nurse might prop a pacifier into the mouth of a babe to keep him from crying." p.17

"The history of philosophy had not yet beheld an atheism like Nietzsche's. Nietzsche may not negate God, but he is the first thinker who, in the theological sense of the word, vey definitely 'denies' him or who, more precisely still, curses him. For that famous proposition: 'If God existed, how could I bear not to be God?' is as mighty a curse as the curse with which Kierkegaard's experience of God began. Never before had a philosopher thus stood, as it were, eye to eye before the living God." p.18

"Plato already discovered that mathematics does not lead beyond the Aught and the any; it does not touch the real itself, the chaos of This. At most it touches upon it...This thus-far-and-no-further was already ordained for mathematics at its birth." p.20

"The differential combines in itself the characteristics of the Nought and the Aught. It is a Nought which points to an Aught, its Aught; at the same time it is an Aught that still slumbers in the lap of the Nought. It is on the one hand the dimension as this loses itself in the immeasurable, and then again it borrows, as the 'infinitesimal,' all the characteristics of finite magnitude with the sole exception of finite magnitude itself...Thus it draws its power to establish reality on the one hand from the forcible negation with which it breaks the lap of the Nought, and on the other hand equally from the calm affirmation of whatever borders on the Nought to which, as itself infinitesimal, it still and all remains attached." p.20-21

"Thus it opens two paths from the Nought to the Aught -- the path of affirmation of what is not Nought, and the path of the negation of the Nought. Mathematics is the guide for the sake of these two paths. It teaches us to recognize the origin of the Aught in the Nought." p.21

"[Kant] undermined those three 'rational' sciences with which he was confronted without himself by any means returning from this undermining to a one-and-universal despair over cognition. Rather he ventured on the great step -- albeit hesitantly -- and formulated the Nought of knowledge as no longer uniform but triform. At the very least, two discrete Noughts of knowledge are designated by the thing-in-itself, the Ding an sich and the 'intelligible character,' the metalogical and the metaethical in our terminology. And the dark terms in which he occasionally speaks of the mysterious 'root' of both are presumably attempts to grope for a fixed point for the metaphysical Nought of knowledge too." p.21
Me: The "intelligible character" is the open ended set of possible meanings each "thing-in-itself" might register on an observer.

"The Nought of our knowledge is not a simple but a triple Nought. Thereby it contains within itself the promise of definability." p.22
Me: Algorithms, via reification, compartmentalization and logical operation, elide these three fundamental Noughts in favor of threshold functionality, in favor, i.e., of technique.

Iran

2007-11-16T13:21:00.001-05:00

On the idea of bombing Iran to stop them from acquiring nuclear weapons:

One of the most elusive questions in global strategy is "How far into the future should we look?" 1 year, 5 years, 20 years...100 years? Surely not 1000, and surely not 1 month.

Of course, limits in knowledge cause uncertainty to exponentially increase as you broaden your sights; thus, a more closely circumscribed strategy is oftentimes most practical. And yet, overall advantage accrues to the player whose paradigm enables over-the-horizon clarity in vision. A player who can accurately foresee the probability matrices that define the future is best positioned to make correct decisions now, so long as his topographical understanding of the causal landscape is relatively precise. If, somehow, one is lucky enough to understand the world well enough to forecast beyond the capacity of one's opponents, all one needs to win THE GAME are a set of fundamental, clearly defined objectives and a compass.

One way of describing a 5 year strategic window is "modesty in the face of an uncertain world." The idea here is to hedge against marginal risks, husband resources, and pursue near-term objectives that, because our sight is diminished, must be defined as "goods-in-themselves." Let me give an example of how this might shake out. A pinched strategic window led us to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan by proxy. Had we, in 1979, had a 25 year understanding of the world thereafter, we might have thought twice about coopting jihad to accomplish our near-term goal. Afghanistan was probably going to be a poisoned pill for the Soviets no matter what we did. Perhaps, then, we should have abstained from shoving jihad into modernity. Maybe we could have avoided 9/11 and all this mess after.

Or maybe not. I suppose the point is that there are always externalities, unknown unknowns, that, given enough time, can mature into substantial system deviations. Any big move in a complex system is dangerous, especially a big move without a powerful flashlight to point into the darkness of the future. The upshot is that you may eliminate the near-term problem only to find yourself drowning in a causal riptide later on -- a causal riptide of your own making.

What I find increasingly frustrating is the refusal of both sides of the "war on terror" debate to contemplate past the near-term in their analyses. One side sees War With Iran as Justice, forgetting that in this GAME the moral instinct can oftentimes lead astray. Another side, overlapping but not coextensive with the first, sees Precluding Iranian Nukes as a good-in-itself, or, alternatively, as a means to an end which is a good-in-itself. The cadres of the Left have even less-well-supported positions, and equally large blind-spots.

Overall Objectives: Preconditions of Strategy

Question: What should our goals be as individuals, as groups, as nations and as human beings?

Short Answer: Our goals toward which we strive should be 1) indefinite survival (robustness vis-a-vis the set of all possible environments, fecundity, adaptability, etc.), 2) optimal independence (in action and from fate), 3) prosperity on these terms (vitality, health), and 4) happiness in the world (too complicated to define here).

As with a journey -- which is not an inapt way of describing it -- the better you understand the landscape the more likely you are to reach your destination. Whereas on a real journey we have useful metrics to describe the realities we might face -- time and space measures, caloric intake, etc. -- we seem to be at a loss when it comes to describing the human landscape. Because we don't have the measurements, we oftentimes can't discern a mountain from a hill, or a stream from an ocean. Thus we sometimes find ourselves climbing the highest peaks or wading across bottomless seas, when a better topographical map would have steered us toward more modest inclines and shallower waters. A good example of this is, perhaps, Iraq. Like the Mongol fleets in 1274 and 1281, we set sail in Iraq unaware of the stormy chaos brewing over the horizon. Unlike the Mongols, we may still make it across. However, if we do succeed in making it to the other side it's only because of the ingenuity, tenacity and honor of the American military -- a deus ex machina our politicians won't deserve, a lifeline on which we can't always depend.

And now we have Iran, and you have an opinion. Therefore, I need to ask:

1) How well do you understand the landscape?

2) What happens to the ecosystem of states when the dominant player eschews all fig leaves which give modesty to power -- not once, but twice. How might that change the behaviors of the other players? What kind of nested feedback mechanisms will activate in response to the centrifugal actions of the hyperpower, and how will these emergent dynamics affect the pursuit of our Overall Strategic Objectives?

3) Are there not easier paths through the mountains? Knowing everything there is to know about how humans process information in general, knowing everything we know about how specific groups process the world in particular, mightn't there be a more elegant way to overcome obstacles when they arise?

4) What incentive structures might emerge if we do nothing? What incentive structures might emerge if we do something?

5) How accurate is our understanding of the Set of Plausible Alternatives? How comprehensive is our Set of Possible Consequences, how well do we understand their probabilities, etc.?

6) How much do you trust our leaders to carry out Big Moves in the complex world of geo-political strategy?

7) Where should our red-lines be?

8) Are we ever going to be able to put the nuclear genie back in the bottle?

9) If not, how do we work toward the softest landing possible? What will that look like?

A collection of quotes to think about:

"The masters of the Roman world surrounded their throne with darkness, concealed their irresistible strength, and humbly professed themselves the accountable ministers of the senate, whose supreme decrees they dictated and obeyed." Gibbon, Decline and Fall...

"Of all our passions and appetites, the love of power is of the most imperious and unsociable nature, since the pride of one man requires the submission of the multitude." Id.

"[In biology] you can look at a signal and infer its honesty based on the cost of expression." Marc Hauser, Harvard.

"Fools! They know not how much more the half is than the whole, nor what great advantage there is in mallow and asphodel." Hesiod, Works and Days.

"The everlasting battle stripped from us care of our own lives or of others'. We had ropes about our necks, and on our heads prices which showed that the enemy intended hideous tortures for us if we were caught. Each day some of us passed; and the living knew themselves just sentient puppets on God's stage: indeed, our taskmaster was merciless, merciless, so long as our bruised feet could stagger forward on the road. The weak envied those tired enough to die; for success looked so remote, and failure a near and certain, if sharp, release from toil. We lived always in the stretch or sag of nerves, either on the crest or in the trough of waves of feeling. This impotency was bitter to us, and made us live only for the seen horizon, reckless what spite we inflicted or endured, since physical sensation showed itself meanly transient. Gusts of cruelty, perversions, lusts ran lightly over the surface without troubling us; for the moral laws which had seemed to hedge about these silly accidents must be yet fainter words. We had learned that there were pangs too sharp, griefs too deep, ecstasies too high for our finite selves to register. When emotion reached this pitch the mind choked; and memory went white till the circumstances were humdrum once more." T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

"As one commentator has observed, 'Certainly had Saddam Hussein been possessed of a working nuclear arsenal, the United States would have been far less willing to station half a million troops, a sizable fraction of its air forces, and a large naval armada within easy reach of Iraq's borders,' an observation that will not be lost on most world leaders. The consequence of this development for the projection of conventional forces is profound. It's not so much that nuclear weapons render the promise of security to the citizens of the nation-state unbelievable per se; rather it is that only the possession of weapons of mass-destruction can hope to validate that promise, with the unavoidable result that no nation-state can afford to be without the protection of such weapons, because their conventional forces are utterly vulnerable to threats from the states that do possess these weapons. With the Long War ended, once the nuclear umbrella of the United States ceases to be extended to cover Japan, Germany, and other states against attack, the drive to acquire weapons of mass destruction will become irresistible." Philip Bobbitt, Shield of Achilles.

"Law develops out of society's need to minimize the collateral consequences of taking revenge." Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Pensees

2007-09-28T23:47:00.002-05:00

Observation: had we deposited knowledgeable "advisor units", who spoke Arabic, along the way into Baghdad during Op I.F. -- while increasing our routes of entry by an order of magnitude -- we would have gained the optimal {space-time-notional} position to see our objectives reached once the next phase materialized.

(Also: had that really been "our next-phase plan", Turkey's back-stab would have been particularly insufferable).

For instance, watch On Demand, Military Channel: Delta Company, first episode (attack into Iraq from Kuwait). See how limited our push was, how much better it would have been had we had Petraeus's plan back then, and the soldiers to see it done.

(Note: I think we should also demand to define the term 'population protection. It should be defined as an adequate force with which to consistently, knowledgeably enforce the principles of objective justice (which is an entropy-lowering psychological point), and by 'objective justice' I mean an attractor of local equilibrium, which is a more complicated point.)

The Abbreviated Version: we should devote an awful lot of energy to trumpeting the following idea:

With 20/20 hindsight, this was the best available Pre-War Strategy, with which to accomplish our goals (which were worthy of us). This was the best way to pacify, persuade, and evolve Iraqi "culture" toward something resembling a stable lowercase-s state.

Heart of Darkness

2007-08-07T15:37:00.001-05:00

By Joseph Conrad. Excerpts:

...merry dance of death and trade

They were called criminals, and the outraged law, like the bursting shells, had come to them, an insoluble mystery from the sea.

After all, I also was a part of the great cause of these high and just proceedings.

I've seen the devil of violence, and the devil of greed, and the devil of hot desire; but, by all the stars! these were strong, lusty, red-eyed devils, that swayed and drove men--men, I tell you. But as I stood on this hillside, I foresaw that in the blinding sunshine of that land I would become acquainted with a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly. How insidious he could be, too, I was only to find out several months later and a thousand miles farther.

I respected the fellow. Yes; I respected his collars, his vast cuffs, his brushed hair. His appearance was certainly that of a hairdresser's dummy; but in the great demoralization of the land he kept up his appearance. That's backbone.

It was hot there, too; big flies buzzed fiendishly, and did not sting, but stabbed.

'When one has got to make correct entries, one comes to hate those savages--hate them to the death.'

There's something pathetically childish in the ruins of grass walls.

I remembered the old doctor--'It would be interesting for science to watch the mental changes of individuals, on the spot.' I felt I was becoming scientifically interesting.

His eyes, of the usual blue, were perhaps remarkably cold, and he certainly could make his glance fall on one as trenchant and heavy as an axe. But even at these times the rest of his person seemed to disclaim the intention. Otherwise there was only an indefinable, faint expression of his lips, something stealthy--a smile--not a smile--I remember it, but I can't explain. It was unconscious, this smile was, though just after he had said something it got intensified for an instant. It came at the end of his speeches like a seal applied on the words to make the meaning of the commonest phrase appear absolutely inscrutable.

He was obeyed, yet he inspired neither love nor fear, nor even respect. He inspired uneasiness. That was it! Uneasiness.

Where he sat was the first place--the rest were nowhere. One felt this to be his unalterable conviction.

In that way only it seemed to me I could keep my hold on the redeeming facts of life. Still, one must look about sometime.

A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse.

And outside, the silent wilderness surrounding this cleared speck on the earth struck me as something great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic invasion.

By heavens! there is something after all in the world allowing one man to steal a horse while another must not look at a halter. Steal a horse straight out. Very well. He has done it. Perhaps he can ride. But there is a way of looking at a halter that would provoke the most charitable of saints into a kick.

Then I noticed a small sketch in oils, on a panel, representing a woman, draped and blindfolded, carrying a lighted torch. The background was sombre--almost black. The movement of the woman was stately, and the effect of the torchlight on the face was sinister.

He is an emissary of pity and science and progress, and devil knows what else.

You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies--which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world--what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do.

He was just a word for me. I did not see the man in the name any more than you do. Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you ya dream--making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams. . .No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence--that which makes its truth, its meaning--its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream--alone.

Mr. Kurtz was a 'universal genius,' but even a genius would find it easier to work with 'adequate tools--intelligent men.'

No, I don't like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don't like work--no man does--but I like what is in the work--the chance to find yourself. Your own reality--for yourself, not for others--what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.

We stopped, and the silence driven away by the stamping of our feet flowed back again from the recesses of the land.

Their talk, however, was the talk of sordid buccaneers: it was reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage; there was not an atom of foresight or of serious intention in the whole batch of them, and they did not seem aware these things are wanted for the work of the world.

I was curious to see whether this man, who had come out equipped with moral ideas of some sort, would climb to the top after all and how he would set about his work when there.

Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances.

And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect. I got used to it afterwards; I did not see it any more; I had no time. I had to keep guessing at the channel; I had to discern, mostly by inspiration, the signs of hidden banks; I watched for sunken stones; I was learning to clap my teeth smartly before my heart flew out, when I shaved by a fluke some infernal sly old snag that would have ripped the life out of the tin-pot steamboat and drowned all the pilgrims; I had to keep a lookout for the signs of dead wood we could cut up in the night for next day's steaming. When you have to attend to things of that sort, to the mere incidents of the surface, the reality--the reality, I tell you--fades. The inner truth is hidden--luckily, luckily. But I felt it all the same; I felt often its mysterious stillness watching me at my monkey tricks, just as it watches you fellows performing on your respective tight-ropes for--what is it? half-a-crown a tumble?

We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember because we were travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign--and no memories.

The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there--there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were--No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it--this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity--like yours--the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there ywas in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you--you so remote from the night of first ages--could comprehend. And why not? The mind of man is capable of anything--because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valour, rage--who can tell?--but truth--truth stripped of its cloak of time. Let the fool gape and shudder--the man knows, and can look on without a wink. But he must at least be as much of a man as these on the shore. He must meet that truth with his own true stuff--with his own inborn strength. Principles won't do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags--rags that would fly off at the first good shake. No; you want a deliberate belief.

Sometimes I would pick out a tree a little way ahead to measure our progress towards Kurtz by, but I lost it invariably before we got abreast. To keep the eyes so long on one thing was too much for human patience.

The dusk came gliding into it long before the sun had set.

And I saw that something restraining, one of those human secrets that baffle probability, had come into play there.

Restraint! What possible restraint? Was it superstition, disgust, patience, fear--or some kind of primitive honour? No fear can stand up to hunger, no patience can wear it out, disgust simply does not exist where hunger is; and as to superstition, beliefs, and what you may call principles, they are less than chaff in a breeze. Don't you know the devilry of lingering starvation, its exasperating torment, its black thoughts, its sombre and brooding ferocity? Well, I do.

Even extreme grief may ultimately vent itself in violence--but more generally takes the form of apathy.

The point was in his being a gifted creature, and that of all his gifts the one that stood out preeminently, that carried with it a sense of real presence, was his ability to talk, his words--the gift of expression, the bewildering, the illuminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness.

Girl! What? Did I mention a girl? Oh, she is out of it--completely. They--the women, I mean--are out of it--should be out of it. We must help them to stay in that beautiful world of their own, lest ours gets worse.

Everything belonged to him--but that was a trifle. The thing was to know what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own. That was the reflection that made you creepy all over.

You can't understand. How could you?--with solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind neighbours ready to cheer you or to fall on you, stepping delicately between the butcher and the policeman, in the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums--how can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man's untrammelled feet may take him into by the way of solitude--utter solitude without a policeman--by the way of silence--utter silence, where no warning voice of a kind neighbour can be heard whispering of public opinion? These little things make all the great difference. When they are gone you must fall back upon your own innate strength, upon your own capacity for faithfulness. Of course you may be too much of a fool to go wrong--too dull even to know you are being assaulted by the powers of darkness. I take it, no fool ever made a bargain for his soul with the devil; the fool is too much of a fool, or the devil too much of a devil--I don't know which. Or you may be such a thunderingly exalted creature as to be altogether deaf and blind to anything but heavenly sights and sounds. Then the earth for you is only a standing place--and whether to be like this is your loss or your gain I won't pretend to say. But most of us are neither one nor the other. The earth for us is a place to live in, where we must put up with sights, with sounds, with smells, too, by Jove!--breathe dead hippo, so to speak, and not be contaminated. And there, don't you see? Your strength comes in, the faith in your ability for the digging of unostentatious holes to bury the stuff in--your power of devotion, not to yourself, but to an obscure, back-breaking business.

By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded.

It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence.

It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: 'Exterminate all the brutes!'

But the wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude--and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.

I seemed at one bound to have been transported into some lightless region of subtle horrors, where pure, uncomplicated savagery was a positive relief, being something that had a right to exist--obviously--in the sunshine.

I tried to break the spell--the heavy, mute spell of the wilderness--that seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast by the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts, by the memory of gratified and monstrous passions.

And, don't you see, the terror of the position was not in being knocked on the head--though I had a very lively sense of that danger, too--but in this, that I had to deal with a being to whom I could not appeal in the name of anything high or low.

Droll thing life is--that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself--that comes too late--a crop of unextinguishable regrets. I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be. I was within a hair's breadth of the last opportunity for pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that probably I would have nothing to say.

And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible.

I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretence, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew. Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend. I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces so full of stupid importance. I daresay I was not very well at that time.

...that oblivion which is the last word of our common fate.

The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky--seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.

Decline of the West, Volume 2

2007-05-10T08:31:00.000-05:00

Free will is emancipation.

Regard the flowers at eventide as, one after the other, they close in the setting sun.

The late ages of a Culture are the ages of much writing and reading. In the youth of a Culture, a shrewd blow is still more than a shrewd conclusion.

Men of theory commit a huge mistake in believing that their place is at the head and not in the train of great events.

The picture we possess is of the history of the Earth's crust.

That which distinguishes Faustian man from the man of any other culture is his irrepressible urge into the distance -- the expansion power of the Western soul.

All that remains in the post-history of a Culture is the struggle for mere power, for animal advantage per se. Unreason, biology, begins to dominate. Questions are no longer felt as questions and are not asked. No more riddles.

The future will be called upon to transpose our entire legal thought into alignment with our higher physics and mathematics. Our whole social economic, and technical life is waiting to be understood, at long last, in this wise. We shall need a century and more of keenest and deepest thought to arrive at the goal. And the prerequisite is a wholly new kind of preparatory training in the jurist.

Civilization is the victory of city over country, whereby it frees itself from the grip of the ground, but to its own ultimate ruin. Rootless, dead to the cosmic, irrevocably committed to stone and to intellectualism, its language is that of becomeness and completion, rather than becoming and growth. There arises an intellectual art of playing with expression, practised by the Alexandrines and the Romantics -- by Theocritus and Brentano in lyric poetry, by Reger in Music, by Kierkegaard in religion. Finally, speech and truth exclude one another. "All forms, even those that are most felt, contain and element of untruth." - Goethe.

Even in the blackest hours of life no adult experiences fear like the fear which sometimes overpowers a child in the crisis of awakening.

Jesus's utterances, which stayed in the memory of many of the devoted, even in old age, are those of a child in the midst of an alien, aged, and sick world.

When Jesus was taken before Pilate, the world of facts and the world of truths were face to face in immediate and implacable hostility. In the famous question of the Roman Procurator: "What is truth?" -- the one word that is race-pure in the whole Greek Testament -- lies the entire meaning of history, the exclusive validity of the deed, the prestige of the State and war and blood, the all-powerfulness of success and the pride of eminent figures. Not indeed the mouth, but the silent feeling of Jesus answers this question by that other which is decisive in all things of religion -- What is actuality?

Jehovah as the Creator-God, the Demiurge, is the "Just" and therefore the Evil. This is one of the profoundest ideas in all of religious history, and one that must for ever remain inaccessible to the pious average man.

For the Magian man, will and thought are not prime, but already effects of the deity upon him. The thoroughly Magian certainty is that everything has "a" time -- a will-less resignation, to which the spiritual "I" is unknown, and which feels the spiritual "We" that has entered into the quickened body as simply a reflection of the divine Light. The Arab word for this is Islam ( = submission). The Faustian prime-sacrament of Contrition presupposes the strong and free will that can overcome itself. To the Faustian, the individual ego must wage this war, not suffer it.

In the Magian world, the separation of politics and religion is theoretically impossible and nonsensical.

The only strictly scientific method that an unalterable Koran leaves open for progressive opinion is that of commentary. The only resource is reinterpretation.

That which today is a property of the god is to-morrow itself the god.

"One has merely to declare oneself free, and one feels the moment to be conditioned. But if one has the courage to declare oneself conditioned, then one has the feeling of being free." - Goethe.

Religiousness is a trait of soul, but religion is a talent.

Was it something of the secret logic of the universe that was touched, or only a silhouette? And all the struggle and passion starts afresh, and anxious investigation directs itself upon this new doubt, which may well turn to despair. He needs in his intellectual boring of belief a final something attainable by thought, an end of dissection that leaves no remainder of mystery. The corners and pockets of his world of contemplation must be illuminated -- nothing less will give him his release.

History teaches that doubt as to belief leads to knowledge, and doubt as to knowledge back again to belief.

De omnibus dubitandum is a a proposition that is incapable of being actualized.

The only true profit of science is that of successful technique, to which theory has provided the key. Discovery of "Truths" cannot be the outcome of purely scientific understanding.

The aim of science is not to experience life but to know it. Truth is found only in the former.

In all Cultures, Reformation has the same meaning -- the bringing back of the religion to the purity of its original idea as manifested in the great centuries of the beginning. Luther, like every reformer, fought the Church not because it demanded too much, but because it demanded too little. The mighty act of Luther was a purely intellectual decision. Nothing was left of that sensible content that formerly had offered even to the poorest something to grip. He completely liberated the Faustian personality -- the intermediate person of the priest, which had formerly stood between it and the Infinite, was removed. And now it was wholly alone, self-oriented, its own priest and its own judge. The holy Causality of the Contrition-sacrament Luther replaced by the mystic experience of inward absolution "by faith alone." This little "I," detached from the cosmos, nailed up in an individual being and (in the most terrific sense of the word) alone, needed the proximity of a powerful "Thou," and the weaker the intellect, the more urgent the need. Herein lies the ultimate meaning of the Western priest, who from 1215 was elevated above the rest of mankind by the sacrament of ordination and its character indelebilis: he was a hand with which even the poorest wretch could grasp God. This visible link with the Infinite, Protestantism destroyed. Strong souls could and did win it back for themselves, but for the weaker it was gradually lost.

For early-Cultural man, knowledge is faith justified, not faith controverted.

"The monasticism of Islam is the religious war," says a hadith of the Prophet.

But in Puritanism there is hidden already the seed of Rationalism, and after a few enthusiastic generations have passed, this bursts forth everywhere and makes itself supreme. This is the step from Cromwell to Hume. Rationalism signifies the belief in the data of critical understanding alone. Now a secret jealousy breeds the notion of the Irrational -- that which, as incomprehensible, is therefore valueless. Secrets are merely evidences of ignorance. The new religion, then, is in its highest potentiality, secretless, a Nature by which one is not in the least overawed but merely put into a condition of sensibility. That which once had been grandly moulded myth and cult is called, in this "religion of the educated people," Nature and Virtue -- but this Nature is a reasonable mechanism, and this Virtue is knowledge.

The wisdom of this enlightenment never interferes with comfort.

The grand intellectual myth of Energy and Mass is at the same time a vast working hypothesis. It draws the picture of nature in such a way that men can use it.

Materialism is shallow and honest. Mock-religion is shallow and dishonest. After the era of the latter, there comes the Second Religiousness. When the possibilities of physics as a critical mode of world-understanding are exhausted -- when it applies criticism to its imaginary world, which it has cleared of everyday sense-experience, and continues to do so until it has found the last and subtlest result, the form of the form, itself: namely, nothing -- the hunger of metaphysics presents itself afresh.

Caesarism consists of the unchained might of colossal facts.

Philosophy currently has much to receive and little to give.

Mutual hate and contempt always flow from the interaction of those in different Cultural phases -- a beat-difference of two currents of being manifested as an unbearable dissonance.

For the Magian democracy means something quite different: rather than landless and boundless consensus, he hears the breaking-down of all that is of other build than himself.

Hatred wells up out of the village, contempt flashes back from the castle.

War is the creator of all great things. All that is meaningful in the stream of life has emerged through victory and defeat.

Policy is war by other means.

Along with the freedom of the press comes the terrible censorship of silence.

Democracy has by its newspaper completely dispelled the book from the mental life of the people. The age of the book is flanked on either side by that of the sermon and that of the newspaper. Books are personal expression, sermon and newspaper obey an impersonal purpose. There is no need now, as there was for Baroque princes, to impose military-service liability on the subject -- one whips their souls with articles, telegrams, and pictures until they clamour for weapons and force their leaders into a conflict to which they willed to be forced. This is the end of democracy. If in the world of truth it is proof that decides all, in that of facts it is success.

Men are tired to disgust of money-economy. They hope for salvation from somewhere or other, for some real thing of honour and chivalry, of inward nobility, of unselfishness and duty. And now dawns the time when the form-filled powers of the blood, which the rationalism of the Megalopolis has suppressed, reawaken in the depths.

Caesarism grows on the soil of Democracy.

Lightdark

2007-03-19T14:19:00.000-05:00

Axiomization is the monologic dictation of the infinite toward the finite. Paradoxically, the correct relationship between the infinite and the finite is dialogic, an infinitely modulating feedback loop (i.e. basins of attraction -- attractors -- are places where potentially-causative infinities reside, waiting until the finite is pushed across the event horizon by its own momentum). This is the implication of Goedel, I think. Cantor, with his theory of sets, showed different types of infinities. G showed that no fixed system, no matter how complicated, could represent the complexity of the whole numbers. Geometrization is the codification of B-theoretical truth at the expense of A-theoretical truth. But it is at the point of A-theoretical being, the nunc fluens, where one finds the dialogic strange loop between the infinite and the finite -- where one finds the melody of ontology. It is precisely the fact of ontological melody that Einstein's space-time geometry disallows -- the Now where actualization actualizes, where becoming becomes , where existence exists.

The implication is that no infinites are infinitely actual; the "flowing Now" is always already path-dependent (i.e. subject to nested loops). Standing on the moon was impossible until it wasn't. Time-travel is impossible until it isn't. Heavy elements, organic life, sentience -- all these were once eternally impossible; now they are extant features of our temporal universe. Rule-based impossibilities are inherently suspect.

The work of Escher: true Chiaroscuro. Light only exists where Darkness is absent, and objective existence emerges from the dialogic light-dark imagination.

Jackson and Escher

2007-03-19T12:58:00.000-05:00

Many filmmakers borrow from preceding art when composing their pieces, and I get a special joy when I uncover an artist's inspiration. So here's my argument for M.C. Escher as Peter Jackson's muse:

Bilbo's Birthday Fireworks:

Escher:

Passing of the Elves:

Escher:

Rivendell:

Escher:

Mines of Moria:

Escher (yes, again):

Saruman Holding Palantir in Return of the King (couldn't find movie image):

Construction of Barad-dur (couldn't find film image):

"Things that shouldn't be forgotten, were lost." (couldn't find movie image):

Timaeus

2007-03-18T21:47:00.001-05:00

Yourgrau's book "Disappearance of Time," notes and excerpts:

Firstly, on Goedel's Incompleteness theorem: Hilbert's math assumed a fundamental equivalence of Form and Content, so that all Content, all meaning (semantics) could be consistently and Completely represented as pure structure, pure Form, pure Syntax. G's breakthrough was to use Form to elucidate Form's limit in expressing Content. G's theorem, then, is a Formalization of the dialectic of Form and Content, and the inability of the latter to complete reduce to the former. G's complaint of the "formalists" was that they "considered formal demonstrability to be an analysis of the concept of mathematical truth." Instead, formalisms cannot "speak for themselves" about their own significance; they need something more to be complete, something informal or "intuitive."

"Formal questions asks us to supply content of the answer, whereas informal questions demand that we supply both form and content." G's genius was converting the informal into the formal, then introducing constructions that limit the allowable "contentual interpretations" of the Form's domain.

Because of this, one must make a sharp distinction between epistemology and ontology, because the latter cannot be reduced to the former. This is the essence of G's philosophy: the distinction between proof and truth.

G, along with Plato, regarded the world of time as "ontologically suspect," and his philosophical strivings were efforts to merge the realms of the eternal and temporal.

For Kant, the proper image of time was a line generating itself: "by this mode of depicting it alone could we know the singleness of its dimension." For Aristotle this dynamic model of time leaves the past "fixed and continuously supplemented" and the future at least partially indeterminate; the place where they meet, the point of Chiaroscuro, is the Now. But these ideas of direction, movement, trajectory, of flux and points and instants -- these ideas are at the least metaphorically geometric, and at most literally geometric. This "geometrization of physics" reached an apotheosis with Einstein's theory of relativity, which represents a complete "mathematization of time" (geometrization of the temporal). Thereafter, the concept of time was completely absorbed -- completely reduced -- to structure, geometry, Form.

The spatialization of time has a serious implication: if time is susceptible to a purely geometric treatment, then all coordinates of temporal universe are ontologically neutral. Ontological-neutrality is the essence of "space", the essence of extension; therefore, if Einstein was right, an event's location in time has no effect whatsoever on the status of that event's existence. To spatialize time is to collapse the temporal mode of being -- the mode of becoming, of actualization out of the potential -- into platonic objects that, instead of coming into being successively, exist eternally.

But as we've seen, as G showed us, one cannot replace content with form. And this was the meaning of G's solution to E's relativity theory. In his solution G proved the possibility of nonstandard "unlucky universes", the so-called rotating or R-universes, where "objective lapse of time is an illusion" ( i.e. all world-lines loop back to connect to themselves, and time-travel through space is possible) and "even though it is an empirical question whether or not ours is an R-universe (it's not), the collapse of the objectivity of genuine temporal succession in a universe differing from ours only in certain non-lawlike features concerning the cosmic distribution of matter and motion shows that in our universe, too, time is merely 'ideal.' "

So G illuminated an inconsistency. Wittgenstein once said, "The world is all that is the case. It is the totality of facts, not of things." But if time and change are real, Reality grows by accretion of facts, and this would mean that the position in time does carry ontological weight. Tensed existence "entails that we can, at different times, rightly assert about the same thing that it exists and that it does not exist." ("Reality consists of an infinity of layers of "the now" which come into existence successively.") "What is temporally, both is and is not." By proving the possibility of R-universes within Einstein's theoretical domain, G was not trying to prove the non-existence of "objective becoming." Instead, he was demonstrating that Einstein's geometric formalism of time could not possibly be contentually complete: time really is "branchwise asymmetric", time-lapse really is objectively true, and E's theory disallowed it. G believes that time is not a mere illusion, and since E's construction of relativity admitted universes where time-lapse was "provably meaningless", there must be more to time than geometry.

The "direction of time" cannot be captured in purely spatio-geometrical terms. In space motion is relative and reversible. In time movement is unidirectional and irreversible. Events cannot be de-actualized or re-potentialized.

additional notes:

This full Meaning of time is better heard than seen. One needs a different explanation for the "unity of melody, successive in time, defined by time" from the "nonsuccessive unity of chords played spatially." One can grasp a melody structurally (tenselessly) by studying the score, but a piece of music must be performed to be completely comprehended: music is essentially a temporal entity. Music is not music unless it is being performed in real time.

"Eternity for Plato is not temporal duration; it is not a measure but a mode of being." Eternity is not "everlastingness" but "genuineness." The fundamental analogy for time is "a moving image of eternity." So temporal being is not complete being.

Time separates the potential qua potential from its realization qua actual, expressed in the form of motion. Being eternal means being motionless. [me: but even 2+2=4 is not eternal. in the empty set, in the Nothing, even that ceases to exist (though such truths will be the last to decay.]

There are two types of truths. There is the A-series truth, which is constantly in flux due to the nunc fluens -- the flowing now -- and the B-series truths, in which a truth about an event is fixed. A B-theoretic truth is "Kennedy was shot in 1963". An A-theoretic truth is "It is now 2007." The former's truth is fixed. The latter's truth is unable to be fixed permanently. For time to be real, both truth-series have to exist -- have to have ontological weight.

Random thought: memory multiplies the dimensionality of the Past's causality; without memory, causation is temporally linear only. With memory, the past can communicate -- and affect -- the present multi-dimensionally. If the present is the coded past, memory expands and complicates the code.

Decline of the West, Vol. I

2007-03-11T20:16:00.000-05:00

By Oswald Spengler. Notes and excerpts:

Language, even mathematical language, fails when dealing with something eternally inaccessible. Words for these things "are symbols, sounds, not descriptive of the indescribable but indicative of it for him who hath ears to hear. They evoke images, likenesses -- the only language of spiritual intercourse that man has discovered."

There are prime-words, like Will, Space, Eternity, and God, for which we have no notions but only names. Of these things we have an immediate certainty, in ineffable, incommunicable feeling.

The point at which "criticism falls silent and faith begins" is the moment that "analysis is confronted with itself." -- Goedel, i.e.

"The physicist of the inner world" tries to elucidate fictions by more fictions, notions by more notions -- to put a mechanism in place of an organism.

They felt themselves, with evident self-satisfaction, to be "dark and deep." But they understood their subject but partially, and hoped for a similar quasi-incomprehension in their audiences. "The only noteworthy thing they proved was the attractiveness of obscurity."

Schopenhauer reduced the world to Will and Idea, and it is only his ethic and not his metaphysic that decides against the Will. Nietzsche returned to the stronger formula Voluntas superior intellectu.

The primacy of Will or Reason is the basic problem of the Faustian soul.

Since its inception, the Faustian soul has been trying "in labour of many centuries to paint a self-portrait."

Will and Thought correspond to Direction and Extension, History and Nature, Destiny and Causality -- distance-becoming vs. distance-become, direction-feeling vs space-feeling, will vs. reason.

The language of the Faustian soul is spoken in a "dynamic syntax." And therefore the "entire Faustian ethic, from Thomas Aquinas to Kant, is an excelsior -- fulfillment of an 'I,' ethical work upon an 'I,' justification of an 'I' by faith and works; respect of the neighbor 'Thou' for the sake of one's "I" and its happiness; and, lastly and supremely, immortality for the 'I.'"

It is not the notion of Will, but the circumstance that we possess it while the Greeks were entirely ignorant of it, that gives it high symbolic import. Kant's formula, "Space as a priori form of perception," implies an assertion of supremacy of the soul over the alien, of tireless striving; the ego, through the form, is to rule the world. This is expressed in the mathematico-physical concept of force and function, and ultimately in the concept of vector. Plato never felt, as Kant was driven to feel, the ego as centre of a transcendent sphere of effect. The captives in his celebrated cave are really captives, the slaves and not the masters of outer impression -- recipients of light from the common sun and not themselves stars which irradiate the universe. For the Faustian soul, and never for the Classical soul, even spatial interval figures as form, and indeed as prime form thereof, for the notions of capacity and intensity rest upon it.

The search for completeness is the search for God -- the search for the original language (in the beginning was the Word). Goedel proved that we will never find it, never find Him.

"And therefore it is that about 1700 painting had to yield to instrumental music -- the only art that in the end is capable of clearly expressing what we feel about God."

In the Apollonian world, even the Gods are subordinate to blind necessity. In Homer even Zeus must take up the scales of destiny, not to settle, but to learn, the fate of Hector. But for the Faustian God is Will.

"Time is the passion of the third dimension." There is an inward connection between the invisible operations of nature and the unlimited range of the Order, between the arts of Calculus and Fugue.

Can it be that a Culture's prime-phenomenon is valid only for a season? For the Western man, activity, determination, self-control -- these are postulates that did not exist for the Stoics and Epicureans, for whom abstention from these things was an ideal. The Greeks were far from making "struggle" -- Kampf -- an ethical principle. To battle against the comfortable foregrounds of life, against the impressions of the moment, against what is near, tangible, easy; to win through to that which has generality and duration and links past and future -- these are the sums of all Faustian imperatives from earliest Gothic to Kant and Fichte: the causa sui of all our philosophy and science.

Carpe Diem is for the saturated being. For the insatiable soul, Victory is a dream, and the struggle is all.

Psychologists are merely fine students (hardly nowadays to be distinguished from the poet) of spiritual turning-points.

For Michelangelo the question of form was a religious matter, and this explains his sadness: for him it was all or nothing, and his incompletenesses left him fractured, tortured and unsatisfied. And it was this terrible vision that frightened his contemporaries. By mastering stone he was striving to master Death; never before has there been a more open expression of dread in the presence of the "become." And never has there been a comparable effort to tame it with violence.

Cultures are merely organisms which are born, ripen, age, and for ever die.

Brown is the one truly metaphysical color.

From the spheres of Beethoven and the stellar expanses of Kant, Impressionism has come down again to the crust of the earth. Its space is cognized, not experienced, seen, not contemplated; there is tunedness in it, but not Destiny. Modern art is a risky art, meticulous, cold, diseased -- an art for over-developed nerves, and scientific to the last degree. It is natural science as opposed to nature experience, head against heart, knowledge in contrast to faith.

As soon as the word comes to be used as the expression-agent of art, the waking consciousness ceases to express or to take in a thing integrally. The spoken word, when used in any artificial sense, separates hearing from understanding. Soon, motives in art are joined to word-meaning. Thus arrives allegory, or motive that signifies a word.

Civilization and Its Discontents

2007-03-01T20:24:00.000-05:00

By Sigmund Freud. Notes and excerpts:

"Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times."

"Writing was in its origin the voice of an absent person."

"Happiness is essentially subjective." me: a complex arrangement of subjective units, each with its own unique "qualia" (and by qualia I mean the product of genotype, phenotype, memory and position). happiness for all is impossible. some happinesses will preclude others. happinesses can be mutually exclusive. "Our possibilities for happiness are restricted by our constitution." me: and by the environment. "We derive intense enjoyment only from contrast, never from the state of things."

"The narcissistic man, who inclines to be self-sufficient, will seek his main satisfactions in his internal mental processes. As a last technique of living...he is offered that of a flight into neurotic illness."

"Religion restricts this play of choice and adaptation -- depressing the value of life, distorting the picture of the real world, and intimidating the intelligence. At this price, by forcibly fixing them in a state of psychical infantilism and by drawing them into a mass-delusion, religion succeeds in sparing many people an individual neurosis. But hardly anything more."

Goethe:
Wer Wissenschaft und kunst besitzt, hat auch Religion;
Wer jene beide nicht besitzt, der have Religion!
(He who possesses science and art also has religion; but he who possesses neither of those two, let him have religion!)

Wilhelm Busch: "He who has cares has brandy too."

Todestrieb -- "death-drive", Trieb - drive, the instinct of destruction, of mastery, the will to power.
das Ich - "the I" or ego,
Eros -- "life-drive" the drive to combine organic substances into ever larger unities
Two Heavenly Powers -- centrifugal and centripetal, entropy and negentropy, disorder and order, yang and yin, distinction and unity, discord and harmony.

"Aggressiveness was not created by property." me: no, it was created by organic chemistry and biological distinction, as a strategy for 'das Ich.' The will to life of das Ich also created Eros as a strategy. Distinction and unity were combined and recombined forever after by the selfish gene, and the play goes on. When balance is lost, a rip-current forms -- of one kind or the other. A man appears to play the deuce.

Wherever we go, this "indestructible feature of human nature will follow." The reign of Todestrieb begets an Eros triumphant. But from the shell of victory Nemesis is hatched...harmony is the foreshadowing leitmotif of a new kind of master.

Trilling: "The Opposing Self" -- A firewall against cultural control it is not -- a too romantic phrase. Rather, it is an inevitability, a necessity; a cure, as it were.

The "oceanic" feeling of eternity, of oneness with the universe.

Christian Dietrich Grabbe, Hannibal: "Indeed, we shall not fall out of this world. We are in it once and for all."

What do men demand of life? "They strive after happiness; they want to become happy and remain so." Almost -- they strive after satisfaction; they are moved to quench desire, to satiate appetite, to accomplish self-elected goals and affirm self-elected identities. Happiness is an empty word. It is hard to bear a succession of fair days. (Goethe). Desires, always and forever, move on. (Heidegger, man as the caring animal).

The drive to become independent of Fate -- the will to power. Fate as Nature, Fate as environment, Fate as other people. Distinction is the essence of the will to power.

Beauty is health, the sublime pinnacle of existence. ("The pleasure before the fall." -- Goethe).

The pursuit of pleasure is ipso facto a drive of distinction, a centrifugal drive of atomizing "I's". As such it needs parameters, channels, conduits, restraints -- it needs these things to ward off distinction's dreaded descendants: dissolution and decay (I am an alliterative bastard!).

Does P = NP?

2007-03-01T20:21:00.000-05:00

Notes on computational complexity, from P, NP and Mathematics by Avi Wigderson (excerpts and notes):

"The language of algorithms is slowly becoming competitive with the language of equations and formulas (which are special cases of algorithms) for explaining complex mathematical structures."

In computational complexity, time is measured as the number of elementary operations performed for a given computation. Time is the primary "resource" of algorithms when studying their efficiency.

The equivalence notion in computational complexity -- any understanding we have of one problem can be simply translated into a similar understanding of the other. "The translating functions 'f' and 'h' are called reductions. We capture the simplicity of a reduction in computational terms."

"The asymptotic viewpoint is inherent to computational complexity theory...it reveals structure which would be obscured by finite, precise analysis."

"Efficient computation (for a given problem) will be taken to be one whose runtime on any input of length 'n' is bounded by a polynomial function in 'n'." This is class 'p', at most {An^c}. Polynomial functions typify "slowly growing" functions. Many important natural problems cannot at present be solved faster than in exponential time. Reducing their complexity to (any) polynomial will be a huge conceptual improvement.

The class 'np' contains all properties 'C' for which membership have short, efficiently verifiable proofs. The verification must be checked in polynomial time. Intuitively, this class is of the type that a successful completion can be easily recognized. This class is extremely rich, thousands upon thousands of problems in which arise naturally out of different necessities. 'np' always have trivial exponential algorithms, which is the brute-force way of searching all possible answers and verifying them.

If P = NP, then the implications are colossal: every instance of these tasks can be solved, optimally and efficiently. Is it possible that for every task for which verification is easy, finding a solution is not that much harder? What about the leap of creativity it takes to find a solution? how do you automate that?

The definition of class P is symmetric, the definition of class NP is asymmetric -- i.e. it is not always the case that it is easy to both certify that an object does have a property C, and certify that an object does not have property C (coNP -- if complement is also in NP).

If C can be reduced into D efficiently, then C<- D, and if D is in P, then C is in P. This means that for this case, solving the classification problem C is not computationally that much harder than solving the classification problem D. In some cases this means the importability of techniques from one area to another. The power of reductions is to relate seemingly unrelated notions. Efficient reductions are the backbone of computational complexity.

Hardness and completeness -- a problem D is called c-hard if for every 'C is in c' we have C <- D. If we further have that 'D is in c', then D is called c-complete. In other words, if D is c-complete, it is the hardest problem in class 'c': if we manage to solve D efficiently, we have done so for all other problems in 'c'. If a class has many complete problems, by definition they all have essentially the same complexity. If we manage to prove that any of them cannot be efficiently solved, we have managed to do so for all of them.

NP-complete problems are everywhere, and permeate all branches of science. Finding out a problem is NP-complete usually leads to leaving it alone and searching elsewhere for algorithms. The implication, however, is huge for anybody who finds an algorithm that solves just one NP-complete problem, because that algorithm can be translated to solve all others. Also, there is a near lack of natural objects in the huge void of NP problems that are neither P nor NP complete. This raises wonder about dark matter.

NP-complete is a formal stamp of difficult rather than a mere general feeling. It seems, then, we have two equivalent classes, P for those problems that can be efficiently solved, and NP-complete for those that can't (if P=NP then they are the same). If P is not equal to NP, though, then NP-complete has infinite levels of difficulty. If a problem is both NP and coNP, then it cannot be NP-complete.

Algorithms for natural problems under natural input distributions are almost all NP-complete.

The thrust of lower-bound arguments is that more time buys more computational power, such that there are functions computable in time n^3 that are not for time n^2. The implication is a "universal algorithm" which can simulate every other algorithm with only a small loss in efficiency.

Any natural proof of a lower bound implies subexponential algorithms for inverting one-way functions. The ability to describe a property both universally and existentially constitutes necessary and sufficient conditions -- a holy grail of mathematical understanding.

The artificial upper bound for algorithm is exponential, but this is only because we are inherently bounded by time.

Almost all natural phenomena, to be accurately represented by an algorithm (abstract process), have exponential curves of time as functions of linear increases in inputs.

Finding is hard, verifying is easy: natural selection rule?

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

2007-02-22T20:20:00.000-05:00

By Edward Gibbon. A brief collection of excerpts and notes:

Gibbon did not like Oxford. The scholars there were steeped in "port and prejudice." They remembered only that they had a salary and not that they had a duty.

"Such were the arts of war by which the Roman emperors defended their extensive conquests, and preserved a military spirit, at a time when every other virtue was oppressed by luxury and despotism."

Valor without skill is an imperfect virtue.

The modes of worship that prevailed in the Roman world were "all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful."

"The aspiring genius of Rome sacrifice vanity to ambition, and deemed it more prudent, as well as honorable, to adopt virtue and merit for her own wheresoever they were found, among slaves or strangers, enemies or Barbarians."

"It is a just though trite observation that victorious Rome was herself subdued by the arts of Greece."

"In their dress, their table, their houses, and their furniture, the favorites of fortune united every refinement of conveniency, of elegance, and of splendor, whatever could soothe their pride or gratify their sensuality... The most remote countries of the ancient world were ransacked to provide the pomp and delicacy of Rome."

"It was scarcely possible that the eyes of contemporaries should discover in the public felicity the latent causes of decay and corruption. This long peace, and the uniform government, introduced a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire. The minds of men were gradually reduced to the same level, the fire of genius was extinguished, and even the military spirit evaporated. Their personal valor remained, but they no longer possessed that public courage which is nourished by the love of independence, the sense of national honor, the presence of danger, and the habit of command... The posterity of their boldest leaders was contented with the rank of citizens and subjects... The name of Poet was almost forgotten; that of Orator was usurped by the sophists. A cloud of critics, of compilers, of commentators, darkened the face of learning, and the decline of genius was soon followed by the corruption of taste."

"A martial nobility and stubborn commons, possessed of arms, tenacious of property, and collected into constitutional assemblies, form the only balance capable of preserving a free constitution against the enterprises of an aspiring prince."

"It was dangerous to trust the sincerity of Augustus; to seem to distrust it was still more dangerous."

"The names and forms of the ancient administration were preserved by Augustus with the most anxious care... It was on the dignity of the senate that Augustus and his successors founded their new empire... The masters of the Roman world surrounded their throne with darkness, concealed their irresistible strength, and humbly professed themselves the accountable ministers of the senate, whose supreme decrees they dictated and obeyed."

"The [successful] emperors...disdained the pomp and ceremony which might offend their countrymen but could add nothing to their real power."

"The tender respect of Augustus for a free constitution which he had destroyed can only be explained by an attentive consideration of the character of that subtle tyrant. A cool head, an unfeeling heart, and a cowardly disposition prompted him at the age of nineteen to assume the mask of hypocrisy, which he never afterwards laid aside. His virtues, and even his vices, were artificial... [He] was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his expectation that the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom."

"The emperor was elected by the authority of the senate, and the consent of the soldiers."

"Of all our passions and appetites, the love of power is of the most imperious and unsociable nature, since the pride of one man requires the submission of the multitude... The ardor of contention, the pride of victory, the despair of success, the memory of past injuries, and the fear of future dangers, all contribute to inflame the mind, and to silence the voice of pity."

"Such formidable servants are always necessary but often fatal tot he throne of despotism. By thus introducing the Praetorian guards as it were into the palace and the senate, the emperors taught them to perceive their own strength, and the weakness of the civil government; to view the vices of their masters with familiar contempt, and to lay aside that reverential awe which distance only, and mystery, can preserve towards an imaginary power."

"Severus...condescended slightly to lament that, to be mild, it was necessary that he should first be cruel... The contemporaries of Severus in the enjoyment of the peace and glory of his reign forgave the cruelties by which it had been introduced. Posterity, who experienced the fatal effects of his maxims and example, justly considered him as the principal author of the decline of the Roman empire."

"The ascent to greatness, however steep and dangerous, may entertain an active spirit with the consciousness and exercise of its own powers: but the possession of a throne could never yet afford a lasting satisfaction to an ambitious mind."

"The fond hopes of the father and of the Roman world were soon disappointed by these vain youths, who displayed the indolent security of hereditary princes, and a presumption that fortune would supply the place of merit and application."

"Military order (modesty in peace and service in war) is best secured by an honorable poverty."

"The grave senators confessed with a sigh that, after having long experienced the stern tyranny of their own countrymen, Rome was at length humbled beneath the effeminate luxury of Oriental despotism."

Decline of the West

2007-02-21T23:08:00.000-05:00

By Oswald Spengler. Here are my notes from the Introduction (some is verbatim, some not, and the italics are gone -- sorry):

For everything organic the notions of birth, death, youth, age, lifetime are fundamentals. Is all history founded upon general biographic archetypes?

The decline of the West, which at first sight may appear, like the corresponding decline of the Classical Culture, a phenomenon limited in time and space, we now perceive to be a philosophical problem that, when comprehended in all its gravity, includes within itself every great question of Being.

The mean whereby to identify dead forms is Mathematical Law. The means whereby to understand living forms is Analogy. By these means are we are enabled to distinguish polarity and periodicity in the world.

Thus our theme...the philosophy of the future. It expands into the conception of a morphology of world history, of the world-as-history in contrast to the morophology of the world-as-nature that hitherto has been almost the only theme of philosophy.

What concerns us is not what the historical facts which appear at this or that time are, per se, but what they signify, what they point to, by appearing.

That there is, besides necessity of cause and effect -- which I may call the logic of space -- another necessity, an organic necessity in life, that of Destiny -- the logic of time -- is a fact of the deepest inward certainty, a fact which suffuses the whole of mythological religions and artistic thought and constitutes the essence and kernel of all history (in contradistinction to nature) but is unapproachable through the cognition-forms which the "Critique of Pure Reason" investigates...We await, to-day, the philosopher who will tell us in what language history is written and how it is to be read.

Possibilities of world-formation are not necessarily actualities.

For whom is there history? The question is seemingly paradoxical, for history is obviously for everyone to this extent, that every man, with his whole existence and consciousness, is part of history. But it makes a great difference whether anyone lives under the constant impression that his life is an element in a far wider life-course that goes on for hundreds and thousands of years, or conceives of himself as something rounded off and self-contained. For the latter type of consciousness there is certainly no world-history, no world-as-history. But how if the self-consciousness of a whole nation, how if a whole Culture rests on this ahistorical spirit? How must actuality appear to it?

In the world-consciousness of the Hellenes all experience--personal and common--was immediately transmuted into a timeless, immobile, mythically-fashioned background for the particular momentary present (the "pure Present", the negation of time, the polar and not periodic, which fills that life with an intensity that to us is perfectly unknown). Such a spiritual condition is practically impossible for us men of the West, for whom the past is a periodic and purposeful organism of centuries or millennia.

The art of portraiture is biography in the kernel, and in Egypt it was practically the artist's only theme.

The Egyptian Culture is an embodiment of care -- care for the future, and necessarily bound up therewith, care for the past. The Egyptian denied mortality, the Classical man affirmed it in the whole symbolism of his Culture (mummification vs. burning the dead).

To the Classical mind self-examination was deeply foreign. Goethe's works, as he avowed himself, are only fragments of a single great confession!

The Classical mathematical mind conceived of things as they are, as magnitudes, timeless and purely present, as geometry; we conceive things as they become and behave, as function, in flux (Newton named his calculus "fluxions").

The ground of West Europe s treated as a steady pole, a unique patch chosen on the surface of the sphere for no better reason, it seems, than because we live on it -- and great histories of millennial duration and mighty far-away Cultures are made to revolve around this pole in all modesty. It is a quaintly conceived system of sun and planets! The Ptolemaic system of history.

Goethe's saying, "What is important in life is life and not the result of life," is the answer to any and every senseless attempt to solve the riddle of historical form by means of a programme.

We know it to be true of every organism that the rhythm, form, and duration of its life, and all the expression-details of that life as well, are determined by the properties of its species. In these cases we feel, with an unqualified certainty, a limit, and this sense of the limit is identical with our sense of the inward form. In the case of higher human history, on the contrary, one works upon unlimited possibilities -- never a natural end -- and from the momentary top-course of his bricks plans artlessly the continuation of his structure.

"Mankind," however, has no aim, no idea, no plan, any more than the family of butterflies or orchids. "Mankind" is a zoological expression, or an empty word. Instead of one linear history, I see the drama of a number of mighty Cultures, each stamping its material, its mankind, in its own image; each having its own idea, its own passions, its own life, will and feeling, its own death. Each Culture has its on new possibilities of self-expression which arise, ripen, decay, and never return. These cultures, sublimated life-essences, grow with the same superb aimlessness as the flowers of the field. They belong, like the plants and the animals, to the living Nature of Goethe, and not to the dead Nature of Newton. World-history, then, is a picture of endless formations and transformations, of the marvelous waxing and waning of organic forms.

To-day we think in continents, and it is only our philosophers and historians who have not realized that we do so.

But something much more disquieting than a logical fallacy begins to appear when the centre of gravity of philosophy shifts from the abstract-systematic to the practical-ethical and our Western thinkers from Schopenhauer onward turn from the problem of cognition to the problem of life (the will to life, to power, to action).

What correlation is there or can there be of Nietzsche's idea of the "Dionysian" with the inner life of a highly-civilized Chinese or an up-to-date American? [me: the quintessential American philosophy by necessity must be up-to-date and addressed to the inner life.] What is the significance of his type of the "Superman" -- for the world of Islam?

What the West has said and thought, hitherto, has remained narrow and dubious, because men were always looking for the solution of the question. It was never seen that many questioners implies many answers. The real student of mankind treats no standpoint as absolutely right or absolutely wrong. All truths are path-dependent. [me: but the set at any particular time is not limitless; if we can find global truths of mankind (truths about the set), truths that, at the very least, won't change soon, then we can do something indeed. the proper foundation for that is psychology].

Goethe the artist portrayed the life and development of his figures as the thing-becoming and not the thing-become. This is how he could say at the bivouac fire on the evening of the Battle of Valmy: "Here and now begins a new epoch of world history, and you, gentlemen, can say that you 'were there.' "

One grouping of the Faustian soul, public men before all else -- economists, politicians, jurists, [pundits] -- opine that "present-day mankind" is making excellent progress. The danger of this group lies in a clever superficiality. The other grouping, composed above all of belated romanticists -- poets, philosophers, artists, represented by three Basel professors Bachofen, Burckhardt, and Nietzsche -- succumb to the usual dangers of ideology. They lose themselves in the clouds of an antiquity that is really no more than the image of their own sensibility in a philological mirror. Consequently, even in point of critical foundations, neither group takes the other seriously.

It is, however, much the same whether the past is treated in the spirit of Don Quixote or in that of Sancho Panza. Neither way leads to the end.

The Civilization is the inevitable destiny of the Culture, a strict and necessary organic succession. In this way the Romans were the successors of the Greeks; the Romans were barbarians who did not precede but closed a great development. Unspiritual, unphilosophical, devoid of art, clannish to the point of brutality, aiming relentlessly at tangible successes, they stand between the Hellenic Culture and nothingness -- in a word, Greek soul, Roman intellect. Pure Civilization, as a historical process, consists in a progressive taking-down of forms that have become inorganic or dead. From these periods onward the great intellectual decisions take place, not as in the days of the Orpheus-movement or the Reformation in the "whole world" where not a hamlet is too small to be unimportant, but in three or four world-cities that have absorbed into themselves the whole content of History, while the old wide landscape of the Culture, become merely provincial, serves only to feed the cities with what remains of its higher mankind. World-city and province -- the two basic ideas of every civilization. In place of a world, there is a city, a point, in which the whole life of broad regions is collecting while the rest dries up.

After Syracuse, Athens, and Alexandria comes Rome. After Madrid, Paris, London come Berlin and New York. The world-city means cosmopolitanism in place of "home," cold matter-of-fact in place of of reverence for tradition and age, scientific irreligion as a fossil representative of the older religion of the heart, "society" in place of the state, natural instead of hard-earned rights. And unlike that of the 18th Century, the social-ethical sentiment of the 20th, if it is to be realized at a higher level than that of professional (and lucrative) agitation, is a matter for millionaires.

Money is the hall-mark of a politic of Civilization to-day, in contrast to a politic of Culture yesterday. Not till the Roman Caesarism -- foreshadowed by C. Flaminius, shaped first by Marius, handled by strong-minded, large-scale men of fact -- did the Classical World learn the pre-eminence of money. Without this fact neither Caesar, nor "Rome" generally, is understandable.

After Zama, the Romans never again either waged or were capable of waging a war against a great military Power.

To maintain the heroic posture for centuries on end is beyond the power of any people. Imperialism is to be taken as the typical symbol of the passing away. Imperialism is Civilization unadulterated. Life is the process of effecting possibilities, and for the brain-man there are only extensive possibilities. Hard as the half-developed Socialism of to-day is fighting against expansion, one day it will become arch-expansionist with all the vehemence of destiny.

Alexander and Napoleon were romantics. Caesar, on the contrary, was a pure man of fact gifted with immense understanding.

He who cannot see that our choice is between willing Caesar and willing nothing, between cleaving to this destiny or despairing of the future and of life itself; he who cannot feel that there is grandeur also in the realizations of powerful intelligences, in the energy and discipline of metal-hard natures, in battles fought with the coldest and most abstract means; he who is obsessed with the idealism of a provincial and would pursue the ways of life of past ages -- must forgo all desire to comprehend history, to live through history or to make history.

It would have been absurd in a Roman of intellectual eminence, who might as Consul or Praetor lead armies, organize provinces, build cities and roads, or even be the Princeps in Rome, to want to hatch out some new variant of post-Platonic school philosophy at Athens or Rhodes. Consequently no one did so. It was not in harmony with the tendency of the age, and therefore it only attracted third-class men of the kind that always advances as far as the Zeitgeist of the day before yesterday.

The solutions of the last philosophy of the West will be got by treating everything as relative, as a historical phenomenon, and its procedure will be psychological -- an unphilosophical philosophy. What is also has become -- the when and the how long hold as deep a secret as the what. Everything, whatever else it may be, must at any rate be the expression of something living . It is perfectly clear that no single fragment of history can be thoroughly illuminated unless and until the secret of world-history itself, to wit the story of higher mankind as an organism of regular structure, had been cleared up.

The World-War was not a momentary constellation of casual facts but the the type of a historical change of phase occurring within a great historical organism of definable compass at the point preordained for it hundreds of years ago. [me: attractors and self-organized criticality, the when, the where in phase space, the potential actualized.]

Stock-taking doctrine -- the confirmation through synthesis of all that has been sought and achieved for generations past, integrating all the truly living tendencies which it finds in the special spheres, no matter what their aim may be.

The structure of rigid being -- principles of causality, of law, of system -- should not be applied to the picture of happenings, to the philosophy of the future.

Goethe (summation of Spengler's philosophy): "The Godhead is effective in the living and not in the dead, in the becoming and the changing, not in the become and the set-fast; and therefore, similarly, the reason is concerned only to strive towards the divine through the becoming and the living, and the understanding only to make use of the become and the set-fast." It is the distinction between intuition and analysis.

Complexity Theory and Network Centric Warfare

2007-02-16T14:18:00.000-05:00

Excerpts (with the occasional note) from Complexity Theory and Network Centric Warfare, by James Moffat, DOD Command and Control Research Program (2003):

Attempts have been made to develop some general understanding, and ultimately a theory, of systems that consist of many interacting components and many hierarchical layers. It is common to call these systems complex because it is impossible to reduce the overall behaviour of the system to a set of properties characterising the individual components. Interaction is able to produce properties at the collective level that are simply not present when the components are considered individually. As an example, one may think of mutuality and collaboration in ecology. The function of any ecosystem depends crucially on mutual benefits between the different species present.

Another important feature of complex systems is their sensitivity to even small perturbations. The same action is found to lead to a very broad range of responses, making it exceedingly difficult to perform prediction or to develop any type of experience of a "typical scenario."

This must necessarily lead to great caution: do not expect what worked last time to work this time. The situation is exacerbated since real systems (ecological or social) undergo adaptation. This implies that the response to a given strategy most likely makes the strategy redundant [antibiotics, e.g.].

Complex systems cannot be studied independently of their surroundings. Understanding the behaviour of a complex system necessitates a simultaneous understanding of the environment of the system. One should bear in mind that the separation into system, drive, noise, surroundings, etc. is rather arbitrary and is far from representing a complete analysis.

From these considerations, we see that it is vitally important to consider warfare as a complex system that is linked and interacts (in a coevolving way) with the surrounding socioeconomical and political context.

Further work will need to examine how coevolution across the entire network of military, socioeconomical, and political interactions leads firstly to emergent effects at higher levels, and of equal importance how such effects lead to coevolution at the higher level. It will also be important to consider the robustness of such networks, and their vulnerability to damage.

The intricate interrelationships of elements within a complex system give rise to multiple chains of dependencies. Change happens in the context of this intricate intertwining at all scales. We become aware of change only when a different pattern becomes discernible. But before change at a macro level can be seen, it is taking place at many micro levels simultaneously. Hence, microcomponent interaction and change leads to macrosystem evolution.

Benard cells also show the complexity of movement. The cells unfold along the horizontal axis, adopting successively righthanded or left-handed rotation. Our very small observer can now locate his position in space by considering the rotation of the cell he occupies and by counting the number of cells he passes through. The emergence of this notion of space is known as symmetry breaking. When is below the critical value, the homogeneity of the fluid in the horizontal direction renders its different parts independent of each other. In contrast, beyond the threshold, it is as if each volume element is watching the behaviour of its neighbours and is taking this into account in order to play its role adequately and to participate in the overall pattern. This suggests the existence of correlations of statistically reproducible rate relations between distant parts of the system. The characteristic space dimension of a Benard cell is in the millimetre range, whereas the characteristic space scale of the intermolecular forces is in the Angstrom range. That large numbers of particles can behave in a coherent fashion at this long range, despite random thermal motion, is one of the principal properties characteristic of such self-organisation and emergent complex behaviour.

This experiment is reproducible; the same convection patterns will appear at the same threshold value and the process is subject to a strict determinism. However, the direction of the rotation of the cells is unpredictable. The form of the particular perturbation that prevails at the moment of the experiment will decide whether a given cell is right- or left-handed. When the constraint is sufficiently strong, several solutions are possible for the same parameter values and chance alone will decide which of these solutions is realised. In this way, the system has been perturbed from a state of equilibrium or near equilibrium to a state of self-organisation, with a number of possible modes of behaviour.

To summarise, nonequilibrium has enabled the system to transform part of the energy communicated from the environment into an ordered behaviour of a new type: the dissipative structure. This regime is characterised by symmetry breaking, multiple modes of behaviour, and correlation. Such a system is called "open" since it is open to the effect of energy or information flowing into and out of the system. It is also called "dissipative" because of such energy flows, and the resultant dissipation of energy.

If we think of a guided missile attempting to manoeuvre towards a target, the measure of loss is the miss distance relative to the aim point. The control parameters are the settings for the missile fins at a given time t. For simple forms of linear guidance ( e.g., early forms of laser-guided bombs), this leads to what is called bang-bang control, where the missile fins "bang" from one extreme setting to another in order to keep the missile on course. Applied to a linear control system, this maximum principle leads to the solution of bang-bang control.

A characteristic feature of many of the systems encountered in nature, however, is that the F's (laws of system controlling rate of change) are complicated nonlinear functions of the X's (instantaneous states of system). The equations of evolution of this type of system should then admit, under certain conditions, several solutions (rather than just the one optimal solution) since a multiplicity of solutions is the most typical feature of a nonlinear equation. Our assumption will be that these solutions represent the various modes of behaviour of the underlying system.

The most useful view of equilibrium is as follows. We represent the evolution of the system in a space spanned by the state variables (phase space). An instantaneous state of the system is thus represented in phase space by a point. As the system evolves over time, a succession of such states is produced, giving rise to a curve in phase space, which is called a phase space trajectory. In a dissipative dynamical system, as time progresses, the phase space trajectory will tend to a limit representative of the regime reached by the system when all transients die out. We call this regime the attractor. The attractor representing an equilibrium position is unique and describes a time-independent situation. This gives a phase space point towards which all possible histories converge monotonically. The state of equilibrium is therefore a universal point attractor. The goal of self-organisation is thus the search for new attractors that arise when a system is driven away from its state of equilibrium.

By allowing the intrinsic nonlinearity to be manifested in the regime of detailed balance, nonequilibrium can also lead to the coexistence of multiple attractors in state space. The state space can then be carved up into a set of basins. Each of these corresponds to the set of states that, if the system were to start from there, would evolve to a particular attractor. These are known as the basins of attraction. The ridges separating these basins of attraction are called separatrices. The coexistence of multiple attractors constitutes the natural mode of systems capable of showing adapted behaviour and of performing regulatory tasks.

Stability or "robustness to change" is essentially determined by the response of the system to perturbations.

Such critical systems are of particular scientific interest. Systems in critical states do not have any characteristic scale and may therefore exhibit the full range of behavioural characteristics within the particular system restraints. This means that systems at the point of criticality are in a position of optimal flexibility in some sense, as we have noted. It could thus be argued that one of the requirements of military command is to so arrange things that the forces collaborate locally and thus self-organise into this optimal state.

The system becomes critical in the sense that all of the members of the entire system influence each other. For the example ecosystem above, the system self-organises itself into the critical state corresponding to this ability of the entire system to be influenced through the propagation of local coevolution influences and the resultant clusters/avalanches of species that coevolution created.

We will see that these relate to ideas of correlation in space or time (in contrast to coincidence in space or time). Correlation in space or time is a signal of local clustering and collaboration spatially (e.g., across a battlespace) or in time ( e.g., across an information grid–reading e-mail creates a correlation in time between individuals, taking a phone call creates a coincidence in time).

A signal will be able to evolve through the system as long as it is able to find a connected path of above-threshold regions. When the system is either driven at random or started from a random initial state, regions that are able to transmit a signal will form some kind of random network. This network is correlated by the interaction of the internal dynamics with the external field. The complicated interrelation between the two driving dynamics means that a complex, finely-balanced system is produced. As the system is driven, after this marginally stable selforganised state has been reached, we will see flashes of activity as external perturbations interact with internal drivers to spark off avalanches ( i.e., clusters) of activity through different routes in the system. Bak's assertion is that the structure of this dynamic network is fractal. If the activated clusters consist of fractals of different sizes, then the duration of the induced processes travelling through these fractals will vary greatly. Different timescales of this type lead to what is termed 1/f noise. 1/f noise is a label used to describe a particular form of time correlation in nature. If a time signal fluctuates in a seemingly erratic way, the question is whether the value of the signal at time has any correlation to the signal measured at time ( ).

For a system that is not poised in a critical state and thus not about to change its mode of behaviour, the reaction of the system is described by a characteristic response time and characteristic length of scale over which the perturbation is felt. However, for a critical system, the same perturbation applied at different positions or the same position at different times can lead to a response of any size. The average is not therefore a useful measure of response. The amount of the system involved is a cluster in the spatial dimensions of the system.

We can use the evolution model just described to gain insight into the effect of a Global Information Grid. Imagine such a grid in two dimensions. At each grid point is positioned an element of our force. Each such force element has a "fitness" value corresponding to its ability to evolve and adapt to local circumstances as a function of the information available on the grid. We assume these fitness values are random at first. At each step of the process, we assume that the force element with the smallest fitness is likely to have to adapt fastest to its local environment. In so doing, it will change the fitness values of the units closest to it on the information grid ( i.e., there is local coevolution). Note that these force elements may be separated by large and varying distances in space. With these assumptions, over time the force elements will form clusters of coevolution of the form predicted by the Bak-Sneppen model. In particular, the statistics of emergent cluster size can be predicted mathematically to converge to a power-law.

In natural systems, we can consider the movement of a boundary through a medium (for example, the boundary of an atomic surface, the boundary of a growing cluster of bacteria, or the front of advance of a fluid "invasion" of a medium such as a crystalline rock).

What happens if we restrict ourselves to looking at the boundary between two different regimes (such as two different nationalities or two opposing armed forces), and how this would move over time depending on the local coevolution of the elements involved?

The most relevant case from our point of view is the front of advance of fluid "invasion" of a medium. As described in [9], we can represent the medium itself as consisting of a lattice of cells, each with either a 1 or 0 in it. A "1" represents the fact that that cell can be wetted. The proportion of cells containing a "1" is defined as p. For large configurations, we can also interpret p as the probability that a particular cell contains a "1." A "0" represents the fact that the cell cannot be wetted–it thus "pins" the advance of the fluid through the medium, at least locally.

It turns out that for this case, when the pinning probability p is greater than a critical value pc, the growth of the interface is halted by a spanning path of pinning cells. Such models of interface or boundary movement exhibit fractal properties of the interface, as discussed in detail in [9]. We shall see similar effects later in our discussion in Chapter 4 of the control of the battlespace using ideas based on preventing the flow of opposing forces and/or third parties through the space. Rather than choosing the next cell to invade at random, as in the DPD model, we can use a model of the process that is more akin to the manoeuverist principle of applying your strength where the opponent is weak–in other words, the cell next to be wetted is the one where the local pinning force of the medium is weakest. Such a model of the boundary movement is the Invasion Percolation model.

In natural systems, the boundary of such an interface that is moving through a medium can be characterised by its "roughness."

For many natural systems, the roughness first goes through a transition period before stabilising at an equilibrium value.

The concept of pinning a fluid locally is similar to the idea of trying to exert local control over a boundary to prevent the flow of other forces or third parties across that boundary. We will see later (in Chapter 4) that the idea of control as the prevention of such flows through an area has important implications for the emergent behaviour of a force (or two competing forces) attempting to exert control over a battlespace.

In the case of control along a boundary, Complexity Theory, in terms of the invasion percolation model, can be used to analyse the effect of two forces (an attack and a defence force) interacting across a boundary, when the boundary moves at the point where the defending (pinning) force is weakest. If the defence pinning force is coevolving locally, then the boundary should form a fractal with a fractal dimension in the range 1.33-1.89 [6, Appendix], as we have seen. In Chapter 3, we show that there is historical evidence in warfare for such an effect, and for values in this range.

Brownian motion is also associated with scaling relationships and fractal behaviour. As a nonfractal object is magnified, no new features are revealed. As a fractal object is magnified, finer details are revealed. The size of the smallest feature of a nonfractal object is called the characteristic scale. A measurement made at finer resolution will include more of these smaller pieces. Thus the value measured of a property will depend upon the resolution used to make the measurement. How a measured property depends on the resolution used to make the measurement is called the scaling relationship. A fractal object has features over a broad range of sizes. Fractal phenomenological characteristics are:

1. SELF-SIMILARITY: behavioural characteristics are "similar" at different resolutions.
2. SCALING: the value measured for a property depends upon the resolution at which it is measured.
3. DIMENSION: the dimension of an object gives a quantitative measure of self-similarity and scaling. It tells us how many new pieces of an object are revealed as it is viewed at higher magnification.
4. NONSTATISTICAL PROPERTIES may be observed. Moments may be zero or nonfinite (e.g., the mean tends towards zero and variance tends towards infinity).

There are two types of self-similarity:
1. GEOMETRICAL: pieces of the object are exact smaller copies of the whole object.
2. STATISTICAL: the value of the statistical property Q(r) measured at resolution r is proportional to the value of Q(ar) measured at a resolution ar such that Q(ar) = kQ(r).

What is of particular interest is that Turner and Weigel's data strongly suggest the occurrence of temporal clustering. Over the 1928-1989 period, 12.5 and 37.5 percent of all extreme positive jumps in the S&P 500 occurred within one and five days respectively of another positive jump in equity prices. Positive jumps in the Dow Jones were similarly clustered with 11.3 percent of the positive jumps taking place within one day, and 36.2 percent transpiring within 5 days of each other.

From our analysis of these open and dissipative systems, it is clear that there are a number of key properties of complexity that are important to our consideration of the nature of future warfare. Such futures, involving the exploitation of loosely coupled command systems such as Network Centric Warfare, will have to take account of these key properties. A list of these is given here, and then discussed further in Chapter 2 in the context of Network Centric Warfare.

1. NONLINEAR INTERACTION: this can give rise to surprising and non-intuitive behaviour, on the basis of simple local coevolution.
2. DECENTRALISED CONTROL: the natural systems we have considered, such as the coevolution of an ecosystem or the movement of a fluid front through a crystalline structure, are not controlled centrally. The emergent behaviour is generated through local coevolution.
3. SELF-ORGANISATION: we have seen how such natural systems can evolve over time to an attractor corresponding to a special state of the system, without the need for guidance from outside the system.
4. NONEQUILIBRIUM ORDER: the order (for example, the space and time correlations) inherent in an open, dissipative system far from equilibrium.
5. ADAPTATION: we have seen how such systems are constantly adapting–clusters or avalanches of local interaction are constantly being created and dissolved across the system. These correspond to correlation effects in space and time, rather a top-down imposition of large-scale coincidences in space and time.
6. COLLECTIVIST DYNAMICS: the ability of elements to locally influence each other, and for these effects to ripple through the system, allows continual feedback between the evolving states of the elements of the system.

Chapter 2

Network Centric Warfare is an emerging theory of war based on the concepts of nonlinearity, complexity, and chaos. It is less deterministic and more emergent; it has less focus on the physical than the behavioural; and it has less focus on things than on relationships.

Combat is, by its nature, a complex activity. Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety...which emerged from the theoretical consideration of general systems as part of Cybernetics, indicates that to properly control such a system, the variety of the controller (the number of accessible states which it can occupy) must match the variety of the combat system itself. The control system itself, in other words, has to be complex. Some previous attempts at representing C2 in combat models have taken the view that this must inevitably lead to extremely complex models. However, recent developments in Complexity Theory...indicate another way forward. The essential idea is that a number of interacting units, behaving under small numbers of simple rules or algorithms, can generate extremely complex behaviour, corresponding to an extremely large number of accessible states, or a high variety configuration, in Cybernetic terms. It follows that, if we choose these simple interactions carefully, the resultant representation of C2 will be sufficient to control, in an acceptable way, the underlying combat model. As part of this careful choice, we need to ensure that the potentially chaotic behaviour generated by the interaction of these simple rules is 'damped' by a top-down C2 structure which remains focused on the overall, high level, campaign objectives.... It follows, from what we have just said, that the representation of the C2 process must reflect two different mechanisms. The first is the lower-level interaction of simple rules or algorithms, which generate the required system variety. The second is the need to damp these by a top-down C2 process focused on campaign objectives. Each of these has to be capable of being represented using the same Generic HQ/Command Agent object architecture. We have chosen to do this by following the general psychological structure of Rasmussen's Ladder, as a schema for the decisionmaking process. At the lower levels of command (below about Corps, and equivalent in other environments), this will consist of a stimulus/response mechanism. In cybernetic terms, this is feedback control. At the higher level, a broader (cognitive-based) review of the options available to change the current campaign plan (if necessary) will be carried out. In cybernetic terms, this is feedforward control since it involves the use of a 'model' ( i.e., a model within our model) to predict the effects of a particular system change.

Modelling and analysis to determine the effect of such phenomena underpin our thinking about such future conflict, the representation of information and command being at their heart. A new approach to capturing these effects has been put forward in this book, and is having a significant influence on the approach to modelling these phenomena. However, capturing the process of intelligent agents in conflict, set within a widely divergent set of possible futures, leads to a rich set of possible trajectories of system evolution for analysis to consider. We thus need to complement this effort with other work to categorise and understand the classes of behaviours which might emerge from such a complex situation. This is the domain of Complexity Theory.

COMPLEXITY CONCEPT INFORMATION AGE FORCE
1. Nonlinear interaction -- Combat forces composed of a large number of nonlinearly interacting parts.
2. Decentralised Control -- There is no master "oracle" dictating the actions of each and every combatant.
3. Self-Organization -- Local action, which often appears "chaotic," induces long-range order.
4. Nonequilibrium Order -- Military conflicts, by their nature, proceed far from equilibrium. Correlation of local effects is key.
5. Adaptation -- Combat forces must continually adapt and coevolve in a changing environment.
6. Collectivist Dynamics -- There is a continual feedback between the behaviour of combatants and the command structure.

Complexity is therefore associated with the intricate intertwining or inter-connectivity of elements within a system and between a system and its environment. In a human system, connectivity means that a decision or action by any individual (group, organisation, institution, or human system) will affect all other related individuals and systems. That effect will not have equal or uniform impact, and will vary with the state of each related individual and system at that time. The state of an individual and system will include its history and its constitution, which in turn will include its organisation and structure. Connectivity applies to the interrelatedness of individuals within a system, as well as to the relatedness between human social systems, which include systems of artifacts such as information systems and intellectual systems of ideas.

The phenomenological definition of a complex system is that it exhibits nonlinear, emergent, adaptive behaviour. Nonlinear behaviour is associated with far-from-equilibrium, open systems, in that cause and effect are no longer linearly connected. This is ultimately due to the type of internal-external system interactions (feedback) affecting our system.

Self-organisation in this context is taken to mean the coming together of a group of individuals to perform a particular task. A feature of these groups is that they are informal and often temporary. Enabling self-organisation can often be a source of innovation. Military commanders who understand the nature of auftragstaktik have always understood this.

In systems where the dynamical evolution is a struggle against various types of thresholds or barriers, the action will predominately occur where the net barrier to change is the smallest.

The species with the lowest fitness coevolves first. Similarly, in considering the movement of a fluid through a medium, the boundary moves where the pinning force is smallest.

Forest Fire: The rate (which is [1-p] if each iteration of the process is counted as a unit of time) of sparks dropping onto the grid is termed the sparking frequency. This sparking frequency sp is a key driver of the dynamics of the forest ecosystem. If sp is small, very large clusters of trees are allowed to form, which span the entire grid. When a spark is then dropped, the forest fire wipes out an entire forest stretching from one side of the grid to the other. In Complexity Theory, this is known as snapping noise. This name comes from looking at the behaviour of the system over time–large spikes of tree extinction (forest fires) are created at isolated points in time. If the sparking frequency sp is very large, then tree clusters do not have the chance to grow. Thus, over time, the system produces a large number of small spikes of activity, which are called popping noise. When sp is in the intermediate regime, the system self-organises to a critical state where the clusters of burnt trees have a distribution represented by a power law, and clusters of all sizes can be created. Over time, the spikes produced by this process ( i.e., the time evolution of forest fires of various sizes) have a similar dynamic to that produced by the acoustic dynamics of crumpling paper, and so this regime is termed crackling noise.

It is possible to relate such self-organised behaviour of a forest fire model to the statistics of the scale and intensity of conflicts. This is the beginning of an explanation as to why casualties in war follow a power law distribution.

A war must begin in a manner similar to the ignition of a forest. One country may invade another country, or a prominent politician may be assassinated. The war will then spread over the contiguous region of metastable countries.

Tuning can be seen as a directive way for the macrosystem to attempt to influence the behaviour of the microsystem. A controlling intelligence is deemed to be necessary in order to guide the system towards a particular goal. Varying the tuning parameter (the sparking frequency) of the forest fire model represents intervention from outside the system in order to ensure that it heads towards a particular goal. This question of tuning makes us consider the boundaries of the systems we are examining, and the flux of energy and/or information across the system boundary.

In such open dissipative systems, there will always be fluxes of information and/or energy across the system boundary.

Chapter 3

LTG Sir Francis Tuker indicated that at a threedimensional spatial level, manoeuvre warfare is determined by three conditions:

1. Flanks shall be tactically open or it shall be possible to create a flank by break-in and breakthrough.
2. The mobile arm shall be predominant.
3. It shall be possible to administer the mobile arm to the point where it will decide the battle and gain decisive victory.

In an historical analysis study [7] of the operational level of combat, it was found by Rowland that the occurrence of breakthrough, defined as the destruction of cohesiveness of the defence, was an important event in the eventual success of an offence. Following breakthrough, 86% of operations were successful, whereas if no breakthrough was achieved only 15% were eventually successful. Once breakthrough has been achieved, it becomes possible for the attack force to conduct a type of operation more in the nature of exploitation than combat. Moreover, variations in the time to breakthrough also led to differences in the nature of campaigns.

Immediate breakthroughs actually had a larger failure rate because of the brittleness that pertains to these very quick breakthrough cases.

This process of irruption has been identified as one of the key emergent effects of manoeuvre warfare [8]. We consider now whether such a process has scaling properties of the type discussed in our general consideration of complexity. The historical data indicates (as we have discussed) that for a given type of breakthrough (immediate, quick, or prolonged– I, Q , or P), and subsequent effect on the campaign (Subsequent Success [SS] or Subsequent Failure[SF]), the mean advance at breakthrough turns out to be a log-normal distribution. Of even more interest to us is the fact that if these distributions are plotted for each of the breakthrough/campaign effect categories, then they have a certain scaling character.

The idea is that an essentially straight line frontage between two tactical-level opponents will buckle into a fractal shape, whose fractal dimension can be calculated as a function of the force ratio of the forces involved (the number of attackers to the number of defenders) as derived from Historical Analysis of infantry battles carried out by the UK Dstl.

Lauren was able to show that the combat front will buckle over time and in the limit will have a fractal dimension D = 1.685. From Chapter 1, if we assume that this process is akin to invasion percolation of one fluid by another in a porous medium, the fractal dimension of the boundary of the resulting interface should lie in the range 1.33-1.89, which is what we find from historical data.

It reflects the asymmetry of the infantry battle in the following sense [12]. The attack force aim is to close on the defence position, and fire is used in a general suppressive mode–actual casualties caused to the defence are only a small part of the process at this point. However, from the defence perspective, the aim is to deter the attack, and casualties to the attack force are very important. Such casualties to the attack force are a direct reflection of the intervisibility of targets to the defence force as discussed above.

There is a power-law relationship between the intensity of war and its frequency.

Chapter 4.

Recent work by Perry [9] has exploited the idea of information entropy to address the second question (with a reduction in entropy across the network corresponding to an increase in knowledge, and this then being equivalent to a reduction in delay in prosecuting an action).

A dynamic process is said to be memoryless or Markovian if at each cycle, the state of the system is influenced only by the state of the system in the previous cycle, and not by the specific history of the system.

We draw on information science to develop a knowledge metric that is a function of the average information present in the set of all possible uncertain events. This quantity is referred to as information entropy and it measures the amount of uncertainty in a probability distribution. The amount of information available from the known occurrence of the event, U = u, i.e. that u enemy units are indeed arrayed against the friendly force, is inversely proportional to the likelihood that the event will occur. An event that is very likely to occur provides little information when it does occur. On the other hand, an unlikely event provides considerable information when it occurs.

Information entropy has properties that make it ideal as a metric for measuring the commander's uncertainty prior to making a decision and for measuring the uncertainty in the entire campaign:

1. MAXIMUM ENTROPY: The entropy function is maximised when the uncertainty in the distribution is greatest. Maximum uncertainty occurs when the friendly commander has no sensor assets to deploy. In this case, any number of units might be arrayed against him with equal probability...the more units available to the enemy commander, the less clear we are about their deployment in the absence of sensor outputs. In general, a probability distribution with a wide variance exhibits high entropy.

This network-enabled approach thus allows us to compute the distribution of the response time of the system as a function of the network assumptions. As we increase the collaboration throughout the network in going from platform-centric to network-centric to futuristic network-centric (to use the RAND categories), so the positive effects of enhanced collaboration have to balance off against the downside effects of information overload and increasing network complexity. Going back to the discussion in Chapter 2 on the Conceptual Framework of Complexity, we can call this overall assessed performance of the network the plecticity of the network, since it characterises the combined positive and negative effects of network complexity and collaboration.

There are two ways to define a cluster of agents. The first, and most usual, is to define neighbouring agents only by those that are north, south, east, or west adjacent to the agent in question, known as nearest neighbour clustering. The second (and although most intuitive, less used) definition is to include all eight neighbours of the central agent as part of a cluster, as shown in Figure 5.2, which is known as next nearest neighbour clustering.

Moby Dick Part One

2007-02-16T12:47:00.001-05:00

Excerpts (Part One) from Moby Dick by Herman Melville:

"Reality outran apprehension; Captain Ahab stood upon his quarter-deck."

"There was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable willfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that glance."

"That immaculate manliness we feel within ourselves, so far within us, that it remains intact though all the outer character seem gone; bleeds with keenest anguish at the undraped spectacle of the valor-ruined man. Nor can piety itself, at such a shameful sight, completely stifle her upbraidings against the permitting stars."

"Least of all, did Flask presume to help himself to butter. Whether he thought the owners of the ship denied it to him, on account of its clotting his clear, sunny complexion; or whether he deemed that, on so long a voyage in such marketless waters, butter was at a premium, and therefore was not for him, a subaltern; however it was, Flask, alas! was a butterless man!"

"So with a broken throne, the great gods mock that captive king; so like a Caryatid, he patient sits, upholding on his frozen brow the piled entablatures of ages. Wind ye down there, ye prouder, sadder souls! question that proud, sad king! A family likeness! aye, he did beget ye, ye young exiled royalties; and from your grim sire only will the old State-secret come."

"All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad."

"Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing."

"His special lunacy stormed his general sanity, and carried it, and turned all its concentred cannon upon its own mad mark; so that far from having lost his strength, Ahab, to that one end, did now possess a thousand fold more potency than ever he had sanely brought to bear upon any one reasonable object."

"But vain to popularize profundities, and all truth is profound."

"All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick."

"Gnawed within and scorched without, with the infixed, unrelenting fangs of some incurable idea."

"The incompetence of mere unaided virtue, the invulnerable jollity of indifference and recklessness."

"Bethink thee of the albatross, whence come those clouds of spiritual wonderment and pale dread, in which that white phantom sails in all imaginations? Not Coleridge first threw that spell, but God's great, unflattering laureate, Nature."

"A white flag hung out from a craven soul."

"Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright."

"And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?"

"The mind does not exist unless leagued with soul."

"God help the, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates."

"Perils abound when wandering in the heart of unknown regions."

"You do not yet have a fixed, vivid conception of those perils."

"To accomplish his object Ahab must use tools; and of all tools used in the shadow of the moon, men are most apt to get out of order."

"The full terror of the voyage must be kept withdrawn in the obscure background, be stripped of that strange imaginative impiousness which naturally invested it. Few men's courage is proof against protracted meditation unrelieved by action."

"They live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness."

"The permanent constitutional condition of the manufactured man is sordidness. Had they been strictly held to their one final and romantic object--that final and romantic object, too many would have turned from in disgust."

"The impulsive, indifferent sword of the barbarians..."

"Chance, free will, and necessity--no wise incompatible--all interweavingly work together. Chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will, though thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last featuring blow at events."

"It took off the extreme edge of their wonder."

"There, then, he sat, holding up that imbecile candle in the heart of that almighty forlornness. There, then, he sat, the sign and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly holding up hope in the midst of despair."

"There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own."

"I survived myself; my death and burial were locked up in my chest. Now then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the sleeves of my frock, here goes for a cool, collected dive at death and destruction, and the devil fetch the hindmost."

"So Tamerlane's soldiers often argued with tears in their eyes, whether that invaluable life of his ought to be carried into the thickest of the fight."

"In tempestuous times like these, after everything above and aloft has been secured, nothing more can be done but passively to await the issue of the gale."

"In the case of Pirates, say, I should like to know whether that profession of theirs has any peculiar glory about it. It sometimes ends in uncommon elevation, indeed; but only at the gallows. And besides, when a man is elevated in that odd fashion, he has no proper foundation for his superior altitude."

"Now, as you well know, it is not seldom the case in this conventional world of ours--watery or otherwise; that when a person placed in command over his fellow-men finds one of them to be very significant his superior in general pride of manhood, straightway against that man he conceives an unconquerable dislike and bitterness; and if he had a chance he will pull down and pulverize that subaltern's tower, and make a little heap of dust of it."

"...strange perplexity of inert irresolution..."

"For as the swift monster drags you deeper and deeper into the frantic shoal, you bid adieu to circumspect life and only exist in a delirious throb."

"But far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and still stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side."

"And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments; yea, serenely revelled in dalliance and delight. But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy."

"Like fashionables, they are for ever on the move in leisurely search of variety."

"Like venerable moss-bearded Daniel Boone, he will have no one near him but Nature herself; and her he takes to wife in the wilderness of waters, and the best of wives she is, though she keeps so many moody secrets."

"I. A Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it."

"II. A Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it."

"What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck the Spanish standard by way of wailing it for his royal master and mistress? What was Poland to the Czar? What Greece to the Turk? What India to England? What at last will Mexico be to the United States? All Loose-Fish."

"What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish? What all men's minds and opinions but Loose-Fish? What is the principle of religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish? What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?"

"And thus there seems a reason in all things, even in law."

"The substance was, Never jump from a boat, Pip, except--but all the rest was indefinite, as the soundest advice ever is."

"The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul.
Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God."

"I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side; the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally."

"But, spite of all this, I could see no compass before me to steer by; though it seemed but a minute since I had been watching the card, by the steady binnacle lamp illuminating it. Nothing seemed before me but a jet gloom, now and then made ghastly by flashes of redness. Uppermost was the impression, that whatever swift, rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern."

"Nevertheless the sun hides not Virginia's Dismal Swamp, nor Rome's accursed Campagna, nor wide Sahara, nor all the millions of miles of deserts and of griefs beneath the moon. The sun hides not the ocean, which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true--not true, or undeveloped. With books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon's, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. "All is vanity." ALL. This wilful world hath not got hold of unchristian Solomon's wisdom yet. But he who dodges hospitals and jails, and walks fast crossing graveyards, and would rather talk of operas than hell; calls Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men; and throughout a care-free lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing wise, and therefore jolly;--not that man is fitted to sit down on tomb-stones, and break the green damp mould with unfathomably wondrous Solomon."

"There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness."

Feynman Lecture One

2007-02-16T12:36:00.000-05:00

Here is a link to four Richard Feynman online lectures, and below are notes and an index for the first lecture:

Quantum electrodynamics, "our pride and joy"

Theoretical history of physics is synthesis: laws of motion became theory that explained heat, explained sound as motion of atoms and waves in gas; also the forces between large masses (gravity).

New theory of light, electromagnetic wave...

Rutherford determined that matter consisted of individual atoms, which had tiny cores that were heavy and electrons that traveled around them. if one used newton's theory of gravity to explain why the electrons orbited the nucleus, some things could be explained, but as the theory got more developed, it became apparent that newton's theory as applied to the atom couldn't explain most of the phenomena that we can observe.

When the quantum laws of motion were applied to the electron, it was a tremendous success.

Checker board analogy: it isn't the difficulty of the rules, the rules are simple. it is the multiplicity of its action and interconnection. corner of board, where interactions are simpler, one can predict almost exactly.

If the atom is 100 kilometers, we're measuring at 1cm.

Min. 21-23, the difficulty of understanding. the fun of it is that it is so mysterious. explanation of difficulty, 23-26 (great stuff).

mayan indian analogies 26:30

arithmetic 29:00 and mathematics 31:00

the difficulty of understanding thing in itself, understanding 'why', 31:30.

mayan's reduced to three books,priests burned hundreds of thousands, 32:45

useless to make philosophical arguments about 'why', modern science, 33:45

monchromatic light, light is corpuscular, it is a particle...

probability in light, 42:30, light doesn't see anything on a small scale, 45:50,

can't line light up, 46:50, reduced to probability, 47:20,

nature is cleverer than you are, 48:20,

colors in oil and soap bubbles, reflection between to surfaces 50:05,

bands of reflections, 51:30

newton's rings, 52:40 - 55, interference, 55:15, how does that happen with the odds of photon particle?

the answer of arrows 58:00, crazy, unexplainable, but it works...

probability of an event is the square (area) of an amplitude (an arrow on a plane).

question session is worthwhile, 1:08:30.

The God Particle

2007-02-16T12:07:00.000-05:00

Excerpts from the book, God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question? by Leon Lederman:

"We have absolutely no data on the beginning of the universe. None, zero. We don't know anything about the universe until it reaches the mature age of a billionth of a trillionth of a second."

"In the beginning, there was a void. And then the nothingness exploded."

"Right after the Big Bang, space and time boiled and foamed as black holes formed and dissolved."

"The Greek philosopher Democritus called the smallest unit of existence the atomos ."

"At the beginning of the universe there was no complex matter like we know it today. This is because the searing heat of the early universe did not allow the formation of composite objects; such objects, if formed by transient collisions, would be instantly decomposed into their most primitive constituents. There was perhaps one kind of particle and one force -- or even a unified particle/force -- and the laws of physics. "

"Metaphor for the physics of fundamental particles: Suppose we are given the task of discovering the most basic elements of a library. What would we do? First, we might think of books in their various subject categories: history, science, biography. Or perhaps we would organize them by size: thick, thin, tall, short. After considering many such diversions we realize that books are complex objects that can be readily subdivided. So we look inside. Chapters, paragraphs, and sentences are quickly dismissed as inelegant and complex constituents. Words! Here we recall that on a table near the entrance there is a fat catalogue of all the words in the library--the dictionary. By following certain rules of behavior, which we call grammar, we can use the dictionary words to compose all the books in the library. But there are so many words. Further reflection would lead us to letters, since words are 'cuttable.' Now we have it! Twenty-six letters can make the tens of thousands of words, and they can in turn make the millions (billions?) of books. Now we must introduce an additional set of rules: spelling, to constrain the combinations of letters. Without the intercession of a very young critic we might publish our discovery prematurely. A young critic would say, smugly, no doubt, "You don't need twenty-six letters, Grandpa. All you need is a zero and a one." Now if it makes no sense to take apart the 0 or the 1, we have discovered the primordial, a-tomic components of the library."

"In an accelerator, the 'debris' from a collision between a proton and an antiproton is captured electronically by a three-story-tall, $60 million detector. Here, the evidence, the "seeing", is tens of thousands of sensors that develop an electrical impulse as a particle passes. All of these impulses are fed through hundreds of thousands of wires to electronic data processors. The hot collision can generate as many as seventy particles, each of which can be "captured" by various sections of the detector."

"Thomas Huxley, 'The great tragedy of science -- the slaying of a beautiful belief by an ugly fact.'"

"Theorists tend to be arrogant. During...I solemnly cautioned our theory group against arrogance. At least one took me seriously. I'll never forget the prayer I overheard emanating from him, 'Dear Lord, forgive me the sin of arrogance, and Lord, by arrogance I mean the following...'"

"Since we are using numbers that are either very large or very small, we use scientific notation. For instance, instead of writing one million as 1,000,000, we write it like this 10^6. That means 1 followed by 6 zeros, which is the approximate cost of running the US government for about 20 seconds. The universe is 10^18 seconds old. 10^7 seconds is about four months, 10 ^9 is about thirdy years. The smallest unit of measurement today is about 10^-17 cm, which is the distance a Z^0 (zee zero) can travel before it departs our world. The size of a superstring is 10^-35 cm. The radius of the universe is about 10^28 cm."

"My dream was to live to see all of physics reduced to an elegant formula that could fit on a t-shirt."

The Mysterious Mr. Higgs
"There is one thing standing in the way of such a t-shirt ending for physics, one villain who refuses to be caught. And what a villain! The biggest villain of all time! There is, we believe, a wraith-like presence throughout the universe that is keeping us from understanding the true nature of matter. This invisible barrier that keeps us from knowing the truth is call the Higgs field. Its tentacles reach into every corner of the universe, and its scientific and philosophical implications raise large goose bumps on the skin of a physicist. The Higgs field works its black magic through--what else?--a particle. This particle is called the Higgs boson."

"The Higgs boson is the primary reason for building the Super Collider. Only the SSC will have the energy necessary to produce and detect the Higgs boson. The boson is so central to the state of physics today, so crucial to our understanding of the structure of matter, yet so elusive, that i have given it a nickname: the God Particle. Why God Particle? Two reasons. One, the publisher wouldn't let us call it the Goddamn Particle, though that might be a more appropriate title, given its villainous nature and the expense it is causing. And two, there is a connection, of sorts, to another book, a much older one..."

"Electrons are particles of matter. They belong to the lepton family. Quarks and leptons make up matter (six of each type, six flavors). Photons, gluons, W's, Z's, and gravitons make up the forces. The quark is point-like. It has no dimesion, and therefore no shape. It is a mathematical point, and therefore the issue of solidity is moot. The apparent solidity of matter depends on the details of how quarks combine with one another." [Me: Irreducible points, like a Cantor set or Sierpinski Triangle.]

"There is a strong force between quarks, a very curious kind of force that behaves very differently from the electrical forces. This force is composed of gluons. Gauge bosons carry information about the force from particle A to particle B and back again to A. Gauge bosons are force carriers, mediators of the force which determine behavior. Photons carry the electromagnetic force. The strong force is carried by zero-mass gluons, and have an infinite reach; the weak force is carried by W and Z heavy-particles, and have a short reach; gravitons carry gravity, but we don't know anything about them. Quarks are building blocks of a large class of objects called hadrons. That's the greek word for 'heavy'. It takes three quarks to make a proton, itself a type of hadron. "

"There are twelve basic particles of matter, six quarks, six leptons. "

"But the trick is to get down to one a-tom, one fundamental unit that cannot be further cut. That is where the particle accelerator comes in."

"The problem is that, even though the quarks are all point-like, dimensionless, they have mass. They shouldn't. The sensible theories predicted they wouldn't, but they do."

"We suspect the mass comes from a field called the Higgs field. It pervades all of space, the Apeiron, cluttering up the void, tugging on points, making them heavy. The field is represented by a particle called the Higgs boson. We haven't found it yet. It exists only in our math. "

"Why do we think it exists? Because it has to exist. The quarks, the leptons, the four known forces--none of these make sense unless there is a massive field distorting what we see, skewing our experimental results. If we don't find it, everything crumbles. Our theories, our standard model, all if it will be next to worthless. "

"The SSC is built to go after the Higgs field, to capture the Higgs particle. What evidence do we have that it exists? None so far, zero. In fact, outside of pure reason, the evidence would convince most sensible physicists that it doesn't exist."

"When we collide these particles, they will release about 4 billion tetravolts, TeV, which is a little less than the energy released when you strike a match. However, this energy will be concentrated in a few particles, not 10^21 atoms like a match."

"How does the accelerator work? One, phase stability, which error corrects for the trajectory of a particle. Two, strong focusing, which provides stable acceleration, involves shaping the magnetic fields that guide the particles so that they are held much closer to an ideal orbit where the oscillations are kept to tiny amplitudes around the ideal orbit. This allowed the accelerator to get bigger. The third breakthrough was cascade acceleration, where it is inefficient to do high energy with one machine. This uses a sequence of accelerators, each optimized for a particular energy interval. These are like gears on a sports car. The fourth breakthrough was superconductivity. It was discovered that at extremely low temperatures, certain metals lost all resistance to electricity. A loop of wire at that temperature would carry a current forever with no use of energy. To get this temperature, we use liquid Helium, which is a true liquid at 5 degrees above Abs. Zero (everything else solidifies at this temp) to cool wires made of special alloys."

"The anti-proton (p-bars) are focused into a magnetic ring called the debuncher ring, where they are processed, organized, and compressed, then transferred to the accumulator ring. Storage is a delicate affair, because when antimatter comes into contact with matter--they annihilate each other. On milligram of antiprotons would contain about as much energy as two tons of oil, but it would take about a few million years at the present rate to produce that much."

"Because of their volatility, the p-bars must be kept orbiting extremely close to the center of the vacuum tube. The quality of the vacuum must be extraordinary--the best nothing that money can buy."

"After accumulation and compression, which takes ten hours, we are ready to inject the p-bars back into the accelerator. A tense countdown ensues to make sure that every voltage every current, every magnet, and every switch is correct. The p-bars are zapped into the main ring, where they circulate counterclockwise because of their negative charge. They are accelerated to a certain speed, then put into the Tevatron collider, where the protons are waiting, circulating clockwise. Both proton and p-bar beams are accelerated further. The final step is the "squeeze." "Squeeze" energizes special superconducting quadrupole magnets that compress beam diameters from soda straws to human hairs. This increases the density, and collision is ensured."

"Accelerators are the largest machines our civilization has ever built. They are our pyramids."

"Quarks have asymptotic freedom. The closer one quark is to another, the weaker the strong force. The farther away, the stronger. This means that there are no such thing as free quarks. Close together, they are almost free."

The God Particle at Last
"In the influence of the Higgs field, all particles suckle energy and absorb this energy and become massive. Once a particle has mass, it travels at less than the speed of light. The Higgs breaks the symmetry of nothingness by creating differences, generating strangeness, and hiding unity. Mass is not an intrinsic property of particles, but a property acquired by the interaction of particles and their environment. The Higgs is a spin-zero boson. Spin implies directionality in space, but the Higgs field exists at every location with no directionality. "In the beginning there was a Higgs field." The immense potential energy of the Higgs field created a "false vacuum" in the beginning, and the transition to a true vacuum released this energy to create particles and radiation, and to drive inflation, which is the increase in the difference between nothing and something, all at the enormous temperature of the beginning."

"Having donated all of its energy to the creation of particles, the Higgs field retires temporarily, reappearing later to supervise the increasing complexity as the forces and particles continued to differentiate. [Me: And on the seventh day...] Inflation separated the close regions of space into causally disconnected regions."

"The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless. "

Sociobiology

2007-02-09T12:08:00.000-05:00

By E.O. Wilson (excerpts):

"Manipulation of the physical environment is the ultimate adaptation...Social adaptations, by virtue of their great power and sophistication, have achieved the highest degree of modification." [Me: Adaptation qua information processing]

"The hypothesis to consider, then, is that genes promoting flexibility in social behavior are strongly selected at the individual level...In order to generate the amount of variation actually observed to occur, it is necessary for there to be multiple adaptive peaks. In other words, different forms of society within the same species must be nearly enough alike in survival ability for many to enjoy long tenure."

"The alternative, found in some social insects, is flexibility in individual behavior and caste development, which nevertheless results in an approach toward uniformity in the statistical distribution of the kinds of individuals when all individuals within the colony are taken together...When one colony with its hundreds or thousands of members is compared with another of the same species, the statistical patterns of activity are about the same. We know that some of this consistency is due to negative feedback. As one requirement such as brood care or nest repair intensifies, workers shift their activities to compensate until the need is met, then change back again [me: shades of the greatest generation?]. Experiments have shown that disruptions of the feedback loops, and thence deviation by the colony from the statistical norms, can be disastrous [me: what happens when the military draft is deemed verboten?]."

"The controls governing human societies are not nearly so strong, and the effects of deviation are not so dangerous. The anthropological literature abounds with examples of societies that contain obvious inefficiencies and even pathological flaws--yet endure [me: is the selective process more rigorous nowadays; aren't inefficiencies tolerated less than they used to be?]...The explanation may be a lack of competition from other species, resulting in what biologists call ecological release."

"Moderately high heritability has been documented in introversion-extroversion, personal tempo, psychomotor and sports activities, neuroticism, dominance, depression, age of first sexual activity, timing of major cognitive development, and the tendency toward certain forms of mental illness such as schizophrenia. Even a small portion of this variance invested in population differences might predispose societies toward cultural differences."

"Sharing is rare among the nonhuman primates...But in man it is one of the strongest social traits, reaching levels that match the intense trophalactic exchanges of termites and ants. As a result only man has an economy. High intelligence and symbolizing ability make true barter possible. Intelligence also permits the exchanges to be stretched out in time, converting them into acts of reciprocal altruism. Money...is a quantification of reciprocal altruism."

"The microstructure of human social organization is based on sophisticated mutual assessments that lead to the making of contracts. As Erving Goffman correctly perceived, a stranger is rapidly but politely explored to determine his socioeconomic status, intelligence and education, self-perception, social attitudes, competence, trustworthiness, and emotional stability...The presentation of the self can be expected to contain deceptive elements."

"Deception and hypocrisy are neither absolute evils that virtuous men suppress to a minimum level nor residual animal traits waiting to be erased by further social evolution. They are very human devices for conducting the complex daily business of social life. The level [of deception and hypocrisy] in each particular society may represent a compromise that reflects the size and complexity of the society. If the level is too low, others will seize the advantage and win. Complete honesty on all sides is not the answer. The old primate frankness would destroy the delicate fabric of social life that has built up in human populations beyond the limits of the immediate clan. As Louis J. Halle correctly observed, good manners have become a substitute for love."

"Sexual behavior has been largely dissociated from the act of fertilization. It is ironic that religionists who forbid sexual activity except for purposes of procreation should do so on the basis of 'natural law.' Theirs is a misguided effort in comparative ethology, based on the incorrect assumption that in reproduction man is essentially like other animals."

"Human societies have effloresced to levels of extreme complexity because their members have the intelligence and flexibility to play roles of virtually any degree of specification, and to switch them as the occasion demands."

"The hereditary factors of human success are strongly polygenic and form a long list, only a few of which have been measured...Under these circumstances only the most intense forms of disruptive selection could result in the formation of stable ensembles of genes. A much more likely circumstance is the one that apparently prevails: the maintenance of a large amount of genetic diversity within societies and the loose correlation of some of the genetically determined traits with success."

"Ethnographic detail is genetically underprescribed, resulting in great amounts of diversity among societies."

"Culture, including the more resplendent manifestations of ritual and religion, can be interpreted as a hierarchical system of environmental tracking devices...To the extent that the specific details of culture are nongenetic, they can be decoupled from the biological system and arrayed beside it as an auxiliary system...Among the fastest cultural responses in industrial civilizations are fashions in dress and speech. Somewhat slower are political ideology and social attitudes toward other nations, while the slowest of all include incest taboos and the belief or disbelief in particular high gods."

"Slowly changing forms of culture tend to be encapsulated in ritual...The sacred rituals are the most distinctively human. Their most elementary forms are concerned with magic, the active attempt to manipulate nature and the gods...based the quite logical notion that what is done with an image [or effigy] will come to pass with the real thing. This anticipatory action is comparable to the intention movements of animals, which int he course of evolution have often been ritualized into communicative signals. The waggle dance of the honeybee, it will be recalled, is a miniaturized rehearsal of the flight from the nest to the food."

"It is a reasonable hypothesis that magic and totemism constituted direct adaptations to the environment and preceded formal religion in social evolutions. Sacred traditions occur almost universally in human societies. So do myths that explain the origin of man or at the very least the relation of the tribe to the rest of the world. But belief in high gods is not universal...The concept of an active, moral God who created the world is even less widespread. Furthermore, this concept most commonly arises with a pastoral way of life. The greater the dependence on herding, the more likely the belief in a shepherd god of the Judaeo-Christian model. In other kinds of societies, the belief occurs in 10 percent of the cases."

"The enduring paradox of religion is that so much of its substance is demonstrably false, yet it remains a driving force in all societies. Men would rather believe than know, have the void as purpose, as Nietzsche said, than be void of purpose."

"To sanctify a procedure or a statement is to certify it as beyond question and imply punishment for anyone who dares to contradict it."

"The extreme plasticity of human social behavior is both a great strength and a real danger. If each family worked out rules of behavior on its own, the result would be an intolerable amount of tradition drift and growing chaos. To counteract selfish behavior and the 'dissolving power' of high intelligence, each society must codify itself. Within broad limits virtually an set of conventions works better than none at all. Because arbitrary codes work, organizations tend to be inefficient and marred by unnecessary inequities. As Rappaport succinctly expressed it, 'Sanctification transforms the arbitrary into the necessary, and regulatory mechanisms which are arbitrary are likely to be sanctified.' Reform meets repression, because to the extent that the rules have been sanctified and mythologized, the majority of the people regard them as beyond question, and disagreement is defined as blasphemy."

"The Achilles heel of the [ethical] intuitionist position [e.g. Rawls] is that it relies on the emotive judgment of the brain as though that organ must be treated as a black box [ethical intuitionism--the belief that the mind has a direct awareness of true right and wrong that it can formalize by logic and translate into rules of social action]...the human genotype and the ecosystem in which it evolved were fashioned out of extreme unfairness. "

"Moral ambivalency will be further intensified by the circumstance that a schedule of sex- and age-dependent ethics can impart higher genetic fitness than a single moral code which is applied uniformly to all sex-age groups. For example, it should be of selective advantage for young children to be self-centered and relatively disinclined to perform altruistic acts based on personal principles. Similarly, adolescents should be more tightly bound by age-peer bonds within their own sex and hence unusually sensitive to peer approval. The reason is that at this time greater advantage accrues to the formation of alliances and rise in status than later, when sexual and parental morality become the paramount determinants of fitness."

Kohlberg stages of moral development:
Moral value is defined by punishment and reward.
1. Obedience to rules and authority to avoid punishment.
2. Conformity to obtain rewards and to exchange favors.

Moral value resides in filling the correct roles, in maintaining order and meeting the expectations of others.
3. Good-boy orientation: conformity to avoid dislike and rejection by others.
4. Duty orientation: conformity to avoid censure by authority, disruption of order, and resulting guilt.

Moral value resides in conformity to shared standards, rights, and duties.
5. Legalistic orientation: recognition of the value of contracts, some arbitrariness in rule formation to maintain common good.
6. Conscience or principle orientation: primary allegiance to principles of choice, which can overrule law in cases where the law is judged to do more harm than good.

"Richness of information and precise transmission of mood are no less the standards of excellence in human music."

"Part of man's problem is that his intergroup responses are still crude and primitive, and inadequate for the extended extraterritorial relationships that civilization has thrust on him. The unhappy result is what Garrett Hardin (1972) has defined as tribalism in the modern sense:

Any group of people that perceives itself as a distinct group, and which is so perceived by the outside world, may be called a tribe. The group might be a race, as ordinarily defined, but it need not be; it can just as well be a religious sect, a political group, or an occupational group. The essential characteristic of a tribe is that it should follow a double standard of morality--one kind of behavior for in-group relations, another for out-group.

It is one of the unfortunate and inescapable characteristics of tribalism that it eventually evokes counter-tribalism (or, to use a different figure of speech, it 'polarizes' society).

Fearful of the hostile groups around them, the tribe refuses to concede to the common good...Justice and liberty decline. Increases in real and imagined threats congeal the sense of group identity and mobilize the tribal members. Xenophobia becomes a political virtue. The treatment of nonconformists within the group grows harsher. History is replete with the escalation of this process to the point that the society breaks down or goes to war. No nation has been completely immune."

"[The autocatalysis model of human evolution] holds that when the earliest hominids became bipedal as part of their terrestrial adaptation, their hands were freed, the manufacture and handling of artifacts were made easier, and intelligence grew as part of the improvement of the tool-using habit. With mental capacity and the tendency to use artifacts increasing through mutual reinforcement, the entire materials-based culture expanded. Cooperation during hunting was perfected, providing new impetus for the evolution of intelligence, which in turn permitted still more sophistication tool using, and so on through cycles of causation."

"After A.D. 1400 European-based civilization shifted gears again, and knowledge and technology grew not just exponentially but superexponentially...There is no reason to believe that during this final sprint there has been a cessation in the evolution of either mental capacity or the predilection toward special social behaviors. The theory of population genetics and experiments on other organisms show that substantial changes can occur in the span of less than 100 generations, which for man reaches back only to the time of the Roman Empire. Two thousand generations, roughly the period since typical homo sapiens invaded Europe, is enough time to create new species and to mold them in major ways. Although we do not know how much mental evolution has actually occurred, it would be false to assume that modern civilizations have been built entirely on capital accumulated during the long haul of the Pleistocene."

[Me: Might there be some genetic implications in the choice-migration to America of similar-minded persons (risk-taking, individualistic, devout, etc.?--the migration of the intellectuals from Europe during WWII?--the Jews?--are there genetic implications in regional migrations?]

"The network of contacts among individuals and bands must also have grown. We can postulate a critical mass of cultural capacity and network size in which it became advantageous for bands actively to enlarge both. In other words, the feedback became positive."

"By adding the additional postulate of a threshold effect, it is possible to explain why the process [of autocatalytic evolution through warfare] operated exclusively in human evolution. If any social predatory mammal attains a certain level of intelligence, as the early hominids, being large primates, were especially predisposed to do, one band would have the capacity to consciously ponder the significance of adjacent social groups and to deal with them in an intelligent, organized fashion...Such primitive cultural capacity would be permitted by the possession of certain genes. Reciprocally, the cultural capacity might propel the spread of the genes through the genetic constitution of the metapopulation. Once begun, such a mutual reinforcement could be irreversible...By current theory genocide or genosorption strongly favoring the aggressor need take place only once every few generations to direct evolution. This alone could push truly altruistic genes to a high frequency within the bands...Furthermore, it is to be expected that some isolated cultures will escape the process for generations at a time, in effect reverting temporarily to what ethnographers classify as a pacific state [me: see the Britons]."

"Mankind has never stopped evolving, but in a sense his populations are drifting. The effects over a period of a few generations could change the identity of the socioeconomic optima. In particular, the rate of gene flow around the world has risen to dramatic levels and is accelerating, and the mean coefficients of relationship within the local communities are correspondingly diminishing. The result could be an eventual lessening of altruistic behavior through maladaptation and loss of group-selected genes. It was shown earlier that behavioral traits tend to be selected out by the principle of metabolic conservation when they are suppressed or when their original function becomes neutral in adaptive value. Such traits can largely disappear from populations in as few as ten generations, only two or three centuries in the case of human beings. With our present inadequate understanding of the human brain, we do not know how many of the most valued qualities are linked genetically to more obsolete, destructive ones. Cooperativeness toward groupmates might be coupled with aggressivity toward strangers, creativeness with desire to own and dominate, athletic zeal with a tendency to violent response, and so on. In extreme cases such pairings could stem from pleiotropism, the control of more than one phenotypic character by the same set of genes."

Postmodernism and Truth

2006-11-22T20:24:00.000-05:00

By Dan Dennett, here. Excerpt:

Here is a story you probably haven't heard, about how a team of American researchers inadvertently introduced a virus into a third world country they were studying.⁽¹⁾ They were experts in their field, and they had the best intentions; they thought they were helping the people they were studying, but in fact they had never really seriously considered whether what they were doing might have ill effects. It had not occurred to them that a side-effect of their research might be damaging to the fragile ecology of the country they were studying. The virus they introduced had some dire effects indeed: it raised infant mortality rates, led to a general decline in the health and wellbeing of women and children, and, perhaps worst of all, indirectly undermined the only effective political force for democracy in the country, strengthening the hand of the traditional despot who ruled the nation. These American researchers had something to answer for, surely, but when confronted with the devastation they had wrought, their response was frustrating, to say the least: they still thought that what they were doing was, all things considered, in the interests of the people, and declared that the standards by which this so-called devastation was being measured were simply not appropriate. Their critics, they contended, were trying to impose "Western" standards in a cultural environment that had no use for such standards. In this strange defense they were warmly supported by the country's leaders--not surprisingly--and little was heard--not surprisingly--from those who might have been said, by Western standards, to have suffered as a result of their activities.
These researchers were not biologists intent on introducing new strains of rice, nor were they agri-business chemists testing new pesticides, or doctors trying out vaccines that couldn't legally be tested in the U.S.A. They were postmodernist science critics and other multiculturalists who were arguing, in the course of their professional researches on the culture and traditional "science" of this country, that Western science was just one among many equally valid narratives, not to be "privileged" in its competition with native traditions which other researchers--biologists, chemists, doctors and others--were eager to supplant. The virus they introduced was not a macromolecule but a meme (a replicating idea): the idea that science was a "colonial" imposition, not a worthy substitute for the practices and beliefs that had carried the third-world country to its current condition. And the reason you have not heard of this particular incident is that I made it up, to dramatize the issue and to try to unsettle what seems to be current orthodoxy among the literati about such matters. But it is inspired by real incidents--that is to say, true reports.

Bobbitt, Berlin, and Joffe

2006-11-19T17:15:00.000-05:00

Here is Bobbitt on our National Security Strategy.

Here is Berlin on Pluralism.

Here is Joffe on American Leadership.

The Use of Knowledge in Society

2006-11-15T11:16:00.000-05:00

By F.A. Hayek, first published in 1945. Excerpts:

What is the problem we wish to solve when we try to construct a rational economic order? On certain familiar assumptions the answer is simple enough. If we possess all the relevant information, if we can start out from a given system of preferences, and if we command complete knowledge of available means, the problem which remains is purely one of logic.

This, however, is emphatically not the economic problem which society faces. ... The reason for this is that the "data" from which the economic calculus starts are never for the whole society "given" to a single mind which could work out the implications and can never be so given. ... Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality.

It seems to me that many of the current disputes with regard to both economic theory and economic policy have their common origin in a misconception about the nature of the economic problem of society. This misconception in turn is due to an erroneous transfer to social phenomena of the habits of thought we have developed in dealing with the phenomena of nature.

The various ways in which the knowledge on which people base their plans is communicated to them is the crucial problem for any theory explaining the economic process, and the problem of what is the best way of utilizing knowledge initially dispersed among all the people is at least one of the main problems of economic policy—or of designing an efficient economic system.

The answer to this question is closely connected with that other question which arises here, that of who is to do the planning. It is about this question that all the dispute about "economic planning" centers. This is not a dispute about whether planning is to be done or not. It is a dispute as to whether planning is to be done centrally, by one authority for the whole economic system, or is to be divided among many individuals.

Which of these systems is likely to be more efficient depends mainly on the question under which of them we can expect that fuller use will be made of the existing knowledge. And this, in turn, depends on whether we are more likely to succeed in putting at the disposal of a single central authority all the knowledge which ought to be used but which is initially dispersed among many different individuals, or in conveying to the individuals such additional knowledge as they need in order to enable them to fit their plans with those of others.

If it is today so widely assumed that [an authority or expert] will be in a better position, this is because one kind of knowledge, namely, scientific knowledge, occupies now so prominent a place in public imagination that we tend to forget that it is not the only kind that is relevant.

But a little reflection will show that there is beyond question a body of very important but unorganized knowledge which cannot possibly be called scientific in the sense of knowledge of general rules: the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place. It is with respect to this that practically every individual has some advantage over all others because he possesses unique information of which beneficial use might be made, but of which use can be made only if the decisions depending on it are left to him or are made with his active coöperation. [Me: Knowledge, fundamentally, is "how to" rather than "why"].

It is, perhaps, worth stressing that economic problems arise always and only in consequence of change.

In a competitive industry at any rate—and such an industry alone can serve as a test—the task of keeping cost from rising requires constant struggle, absorbing a great part of the energy of the manager. How easy it is for an inefficient manager to dissipate the differentials on which profitability rests, and that it is possible, with the same technical facilities, to produce with a great variety of costs, are among the commonplaces of business experience which do not seem to be equally familiar in the study of the economist. The very strength of the desire, constantly voiced by producers and engineers, to be allowed to proceed untrammeled by considerations of money costs, is eloquent testimony to the extent to which these factors enter into their daily work.

This is, perhaps, also the point where I should briefly mention the fact that the sort of knowledge with which I have been concerned is knowledge of the kind which by its nature cannot enter into statistics and therefore cannot be conveyed to any central authority in statistical form. It follows from this that central planning based on statistical information by its nature cannot take direct account of these circumstances of time and place and that the central planner will have to find some way or other in which the decisions depending on them can be left to the "man on the spot."[Me: See Complexity and Network Centric Warfare--Hayek's point is also applicable to war and nation building, where the most useful knowledge, knowledge of particular and local context, cannot be reduced to statistics (i.e. cannot be reduced to its relationship to other phenomena); this knowledge is instead essentially specific and unique and useful only insofar as it remains so].

We need decentralization because only thus can we insure that the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place will be promptly used. But the "man on the spot" cannot decide solely on the basis of his limited but intimate knowledge of the facts of his immediate surroundings. There still remains the problem of communicating to him such further information as he needs to fit his decisions into the whole pattern of changes of the larger economic system.

There is hardly anything that happens anywhere in the world that might not have an effect on the decision he ought to make. But he need not know of these events as such, nor of all their effects.

Fundamentally, in a system in which the knowledge of the relevant facts is dispersed among many people, prices can act to coördinate the separate actions of different people in the same way as subjective values help the individual to coördinate the parts of his plan. The whole acts as one market, not because any of its members survey the whole field, but because their limited individual fields of vision sufficiently overlap so that through many intermediaries the relevant information is communicated to all.

We must look at the price system as such a mechanism for communicating information if we want to understand its real function—a function which, of course, it fulfils less perfectly as prices grow more rigid. The most significant fact about this system is the economy of knowledge with which it operates, or how little the individual participants need to know in order to be able to take the right action. In abbreviated form, by a kind of symbol, only the most essential information is passed on and passed on only to those concerned.

I have deliberately used the word "marvel" to shock the reader out of the complacency with which we often take the working of this mechanism for granted. I am convinced that if it were the result of deliberate human design, and if the people guided by the price changes understood that their decisions have significance far beyond their immediate aim, this mechanism would have been acclaimed as one of the greatest triumphs of the human mind. Its misfortune is the double one that it is not the product of human design and that the people guided by it usually do not know why they are made to do what they do. But those who clamor for "conscious direction"—and who cannot believe that anything which has evolved without design (and even without our understanding it) should solve problems which we should not be able to solve consciously—should remember this: The problem is precisely how to extend the span of out utilization of resources beyond the span of the control of any one mind; and therefore, how to dispense with the need of conscious control, and how to provide inducements which will make the individuals do the desirable things without anyone having to tell them what to do.

As Alfred Whitehead has said in another connection, "It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them." This is of profound significance in the social field. We make constant use of formulas, symbols, and rules whose meaning we do not understand and through the use of which we avail ourselves of the assistance of knowledge which individually we do not possess. We have developed these practices and institutions by building upon habits and institutions which have proved successful in their own sphere and which have in turn become the foundation of the civilization we have built up.

Adam Smith [wrote] that the essential utility of the price system consists in inducing the individual, while seeking his own interest, to do what is in the general interest.

Implication is a logical relationship which can be meaningfully asserted only of propositions simultaneously present to one and the same mind.

There is something fundamentally wrong with an approach which habitually disregards an essential part of the phenomena with which we have to deal: the unavoidable imperfection of man's knowledge and the consequent need for a process by which knowledge is constantly communicated and acquired. Any approach, such as that of much of mathematical economics with its simultaneous equations, which in effect starts from the assumption that people's knowledge corresponds with the objective facts of the situation, systematically leaves out what is our main task to explain. I am far from denying that in our system equilibrium analysis has a useful function to perform. But when it comes to the point where it misleads some of our leading thinkers into believing that the situation which it describes has direct relevance to the solution of practical problems, it is high time that we remember that it does not deal with the social process at all and that it is no more than a useful preliminary to the study of the main problem.

Quest or Quiescence?

2006-10-26T12:09:00.000-05:00

After three and half years of hindsight, I think it's time to once again ask the central question of our time:

Do we husband our values, or do we export them?

If it is true that a Healthy Set of Beliefs and Motivations is one that enables a human being--like a cell, a tissue, etc.--to assimilate into higher and higher levels of organization (this, I think, is intuitively obvious), then it is vital to our long term interests as free individuals that we spread those realities that facilitate complex bonding potential and flexibility, i.e. the values of the Declaration of Independence and Rawls' Theory of Justice (in its fundamental abstraction, not as it manifests itself in redistribution).

In Iraq, we are seeing the consequences of an infertile mental substrate. The culture of Arabia is stuck revolving around its own Lorenz attractor of stagnant beliefs and practices. Only intervention or massive war will break the generational transfer of these detrimental values. That is, for me, still the issue in the War on Terror.

Our technology will continue to find its way to the mal-adjusted. Adjustment qua memetic evolution (genetic?--probably not, but a scary thought) is the only way out of the coming slaughter, yet most ignore it. It's all about how to manage Iraq's dissolution, or how to bring our boys home, all the while the real problem--the problem that brought us 9/11 and will continue to do so--is forgotten.

So the question remains: do we draw up the bridge, cement the boundaries around our American system and treat all other undeveloped cultures as "environment" (see J.G. Miller's Living Systems); or do we embark on a costly quest to beneficently, and perhaps even forcefully, evolve the belief structure of almost half the people on the planet?

The Origins of Music: Innateness, Uniqueness, and Evolution

2006-10-09T10:47:00.000-05:00

Publication by Josh McDermott and Marc Hauser, here (.pdf file). Excerpt:

Music stands in sharp contrast to most other enjoyable human behaviors (eating, sleeping, talking, sex) in that it yields no obvious benefits to those who partake of it. The evolutionary origins of music have thus puzzled scientists and philosophers alike since the time of Darwin (1871). [...]

Every culture in the world has some form of music, and most cultures have apparently developed music independently from each other. At the very least, therefore, there seems to be some innate machinery motivating the production and appreciation of music. [...]

Infants pose an experimental challenge because unlike an adult subject, they cannot verbally report on their experiences. Instead, developmental psychologists make use of the fact that changes that are salient to an infant attract its attention, which can be measured via nonverbal behavioral responses. Although the behavioral assays vary, the fundamental logic underlying the method is the same: Exemplars from one category are repeatedly presented until the infant’s response -— sucking a non-nutritive pacifier for neonates, looking or orienting to a stimulus presentation for older infants -— habituates, at which point exemplars from either the same or a different category are presented. In a classic setup, a sample of music is played repeatedly from a speaker. Once the orienting response to the music habituates, the experimenter conducts test trials, some of which introduce some change to the music sample, such as a change in key or a rearrangement of the notes. If the infant is sensitive to the change that is made, then they will tend to look longer at the speaker following the trials containing the change. [...]

Lullabies—songs composed and performed for infants—are a particularly striking musical phenomenon found in cultures across the world and appear to represent a true music universal. Lullabies are recognizable as such regardless of the culture (Trehub, Unyk, & Trainor, 1993), even when verbal cues are obscured by low-pass filtering (Unyk, Trehub, Trainor, & Schellenberg, 1992). This suggests that there are at least some invariant musical features that characterize infant-directed music; this aspect of music directly parallels studies in language of infant-directed speech are often characterized as simple and repetitive by adult listeners, and may feature more descending intervals than other melodies (Unyk et al., 1992). Both adults and children perform lullabies in a distinctive manner when singing to infants; listeners can pick out the version of a melody that was actually sung in the presence of an infant. Infant-directed singing tends to have a higher pitch and slower tempo than regular singing and carries a particular timbre, jitter, and shimmer (Trehub, Hill, & Kamenetsky, 1997b).

The characteristics of lullabies, as well as the particular acoustic properties that adults and children imbue them with when sung to infants, appear to be tailored to what infants like. When infants are played both lullabies and adult songs under similar conditions, adults who watch them on videotape judge the infants to be happier when played the lullabies than when played adult songs (Trehub, 2000). The fact that the preferred characteristics of lullabies are culturally universal suggests that infant preferences for lullabies are indeed innate. Further, because no other animal parent vocalizes to its offspring in anything resembling motherese or a lullaby, this style of musical expression also appears to be uniquely human. At this point the origin of lullabies and their particular features remain unknown, but their existence suggests that at least one major genre of music is predominantly innate in origin and uniquely human.

Lyotard and The Postmodern

2006-10-04T16:23:00.000-05:00

An excerpt from Jean-Francois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge:

"What, then, is the postmodern? What place does it or does it not occupy in the vertiginous work of the questions hurled at the rules of image and narration? It is undoubtedly a part of the modern. All that has been received, if only yesterday (modo, modo, Petronius used to say), must be suspected. What space does Cezanne challenge? The Impressionists'. What object do Picasso and Braque attack? Cezanne's. What presupposition does Duchamp break with in 1912? That which says one must make a painting, be it cubist. And Buren questions that other presupposition which he believes had survived untouched by the work of Duchamp: the place of presentation of the work. In an amazing acceleration, the generations precipitate themselves. A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.

Yet I would like not to remain with this slightly mechanistic meaning of the word. If it is true that modernity takes place in the withdrawal of the real and according to the sublime relation between the presentable and the conceivable, it is possible, within this relation, to distinguish two modes (to use the musician's language). The emphasis can be placed on the powerlessness of the faculty of presentation, on the nostalgia for presence felt by the human subject, on the obscure and futile will which inhabits him in spite of everything. The emphasis can be placed, rather, on the power of the faculty to conceive, on its "inhumanity" so to speak (it was the quality Apollinaire demanded of modern artists), since it is not the business of our understanding whether or not human sensibility or imagination can match what it conceives. The emphasis can also be placed on the increase of being and the jubilation which result from the invention of new rules of the game, be it pictorial, artistic, or any other...[sic]...The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable."

Hence was born hip-hop, punk rock, avant-garde cinema, Wes Anderson, Michel Gondry, Michael Barney, and the future of all good art to come, art that will do no less than re-create the world. -KWG

Pensees

2006-10-04T11:02:00.000-05:00

By Blaise Pascal, here. Excerpt:

When we wish to correct with advantage and to show another that he errs, we must notice from what side he views the matter, for on that side it is usually true, and admit that truth to him, but reveal to him the side on which it is false. He is satisfied with that, for he sees that he was not mistaken and that he only failed to see all sides. Now, no one is offended at not seeing everything; but one does not like to be mistaken, and that perhaps arises from the fact that man naturally cannot see everything, and that naturally he cannot err in the side he looks at, since the perceptions of our senses are always true. [...]

All great amusements are dangerous to the Christian life; but among all those which the world has invented there is none more to be feared than the theatre. [...]

Words differently arranged have a different meaning, and meanings differently arranged have different effects. [...]

Man loves malice, but not against one-eyed men nor the unfortunate, but against the fortunate and proud. People are mistaken in thinking otherwise. [...]

As Americans, it might be prudent to keep that last aphorism in mind.

Order for Free

2006-10-04T08:08:00.000-05:00

By Stuart Kauffman, here. Excerpt:

What kinds of complex systems can evolve by accumulation of successive useful variations? Does selection by itself achieve complex systems able to adapt? Are there lawful properties characterizing such complex systems? The overall answer may be that complex systems constructed so that they're on the boundary between order and chaos are those best able to adapt by mutation and selection.

Chaos is a subset of complexity. It's an analysis of the behavior of continuous dynamical systems — like hydrodynamic systems, or the weather — or discrete systems that show recurrences of features and high sensitivity to initial conditions, such that very small changes in the initial conditions can lead a system to behave in very different ways. A good example of this is the so called butterfly effect: the idea is that a butterfly in Rio can change the weather in Chicago. An infinitesimal change in initial conditions leads to divergent pathways in the evolution of the system. Those pathways are called trajectories. The enormous puzzle is the following: in order for life to have evolved, it can't possibly be the case that trajectories are always diverging. Biological systems can't work if divergence is all that's going on. You have to ask what kinds of complex systems can accumulate useful variation.

We've discovered the fact that in the evolution of life very complex systems can have convergent flow and not divergent flow. Divergent flow is sensitivity to initial conditions. Convergent flow means that even different starting places that are far apart come closer together. That's the fundamental principle of homeostasis, or stability to perturbation, and it's a natural feature of many complex systems. We haven't known that until now. That's what I found out twenty-five years ago, looking at what are now called Kauffman models — random networks exhibiting what I call "order for free."

A Possible Solution for the Problem of Time in Quantum Cosmology

2006-10-04T08:07:00.000-05:00

By Stuart Kauffman and Lee Smolin, here. Abstract:

We argue that in classical and quantum theories of gravity the configuration space and Hilbert space may not be constructible through any finite procedure. If this is the case then the "problem of time" in quantum cosmology may be a pseudoproblem, because the argument that time disappears from the theory depends on constructions that cannot be realized by any finite beings that live in the universe. We propose an alternative formulation of quantum cosmological theories in which it is only necessary to predict the amplitudes for any given state to evolve to a finite number of possible successor states. The space of accessible states of the system is then constructed as the universe evolves from any initial state. In this kind of formulation of quantum cosmology time and causality are built in at the fundamental level. An example of such a theory is the recent path integral formulation of quantum gravity of Markopoulou and Smolin, but there are a wide class of theories of this type.

Excerpt:

The argument that time is not a fundamental aspect of the world goes like this. In classical mechanics one begins with a space of configurations C of a system S. Usually the system S is assumed to be a subsystem of the universe. In this case there is a clock outside the system, which is carried by some inertial observer. This clock is used to label the trajectory of the system in the configuration space C. The classical trajectories are then extrema of some action principle.

Were it not for the external clock, one could already say that time has disappeared, as each trajectory exists all at once as a curve g on C. Once the trajectory is chosen, the whole history of the system is determined. In this sense there is nothing in the description that corresponds to what we are used to thinking of as a flow or progression of time. Indeed, just as the whole of any one trajectory exists when any point and velocity are specified, the whole set of trajectories may be said to exist as well, as a timeless set of possibilities.

Time is in fact represented in the description, but it is not in any sense a time that is associated with the system itself. Instead, the t in ordinary classical mechanics refers to a clock carried by an inertial observer, which is not part of the dynamical system being modeled. This external clock is represented in the configuration space description as a special parameterization of each trajectory, according to which the equations of motion are satisfied. Thus, it may be said that there is no sense in which time as something physical is represented in classical mechanics, instead the problem is postponed, as what is represented is time as marked by a clock that exists outside of the physical system which is modeled by the trajectories in the configuration space C.

Richard Feynman

2006-10-02T17:13:00.000-05:00

Here's Richard Feynman's Nobel Lecture: The Development of the Space-Time View of Quantum Electrodynamics. Here's an excerpt:

We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or to describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn't any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work, although, there has been in these days, some interest in this kind of thing. Since winning the prize is a personal thing, I thought I could be excused in this particular situation, if I were to talk personally about my relationship to quantum electrodynamics, rather than to discuss the subject itself in a refined and finished fashion. Furthermore, since there are three people who have won the prize in physics, if they are all going to be talking about quantum electrodynamics itself, one might become bored with the subject. So, what I would like to tell you about today are the sequence of events, really the sequence of ideas, which occurred, and by which I finally came out the other end with an unsolved problem for which I ultimately received a prize.

Here are four of Feynman's lectures on video.

Here is Feynman's famous talk on nanotechnology.

Enjoy.

Americans and their Myths

2006-10-02T13:24:00.001-05:00

Here's Sartre's 1947 essay. Excerpt:

There are the great myths, the myths of happiness, of progress, of liberty, of triumphant maternity; there is realism and optimism--and then there are the Americans, who, nothing at first, grow up among these colossal statues and find their way as best they can among them. There is this myth of happiness: black-magic slogans warn you to be happy at once; films that "end well" show a life of rosy ease to the exhausted crowds; the language is charged with optimistic and unrestrained expressions-"have a good time," "life is fun," and the like. But there are also these people, who, though conventionally happy, suffer from an obscure malaise to which no name can be given, who are tragic through fear of being so, through that total absence of the tragic in them and around them. [...]

There are the thousand taboos which proscribe love outside of marriage--and there is the litter of used contraceptives in the back yards of coeducational colleges; there are all those men and women who drink before making love in order to transgress in drunkenness and not remember. There are the neat, coquettish houses, the pure-white apartments with radio, armchair, pipe, and stand--little paradises; and there are the tenants of those apartments who, after dinner, leave their chairs, radios, wives, pipes, and children, and go to the bar across the street to get drunk alone.

States Of The Union

2006-10-01T21:24:00.000-05:00

It is a pity that more people are aware of the YouTube flavor-of-the-week than singer-songwriter-genius Sufjan Stevens. After releasing his mythographical-cum-personal "state albums" for Michigan and Illinois, Stevens has boldly declared his intention to create an album for all fifty states in the Union. To many the ambition seems more than audacious, to some absurd, yet a close study of Stevens' music gives one the hope that not only will he complete his 50 opuses (opii?), but that he will continue to make each state album as personally affecting and sprawling as his first two. Much pabulum in the New York press has been made of Sufjan Stevens: he has had to endure labels such as "Wonder Boy" and other monikers that sell magazines but neglect the justice and brilliance of his music. This post is not meant to be a history of his musical training, his prodigious and capacious abilities as a musician, but, rather, his devotion to uniting through music an America never more polarized than it is today.

For the Sufjan (pronounced Soof-yan) uninitiated, a good place to begin delving into an already astounding body of work for a 31-year-old is his 2005 Illinois album, Come On Feel The Illinoise!. The album is impossible to categorize as mere anti-folk or post-punk, as its various symphonic arrangements and softly sung ballads defy the expectations of most indie rockers. The rollicking train of a song "Chicago" may be the most popular on the album, gaining enough notoriety to be tapped for use in the superb film Little Miss Sunshine. The choice of the song for the film, whose narrative engine is a road trip, should surprise no one, as its melodic and orchestral impulses signify motion toward a destination. For this critic, however, the album's best song is "Casimir Pulaski Day," a heart-wrenching ballad about a friend dying of bone cancer. The song is replete with rich and full characters - the dying girl and shards of the singer's memories of stolen kisses from her, the father whose incomprehension of his daughter's death has made him a veritable ghost. But it is the objects and places - personal and familiar - that resonate so seismically with the listener: Golden Rod ice cream, a 4-H stone, an anonymous hospital room, a Tuesday night Bible study, the floor of a bathroom stall on The Great Divide. Stevens' sincerity, a rarity for so many these days, is without doubt his greatest gift. The song is as much about a reconciliation with an illogical God as it is his friend, as much about the singer making sense of a greater and overwhelming America through the tiny keyhole of a single lyric in a single state.

Sufjan Stevens' music makes anonymous people matter, makes forgotten historical figures suddenly relevant again, makes words count for more than illusionary prisms of style or image. Stevens does not bring "sexy" back - he brings America together over dinner tables, church picnics, funerals, garden shows, softball games. He makes us weep over what we are capable of, smile over what we can do as a nation.