John Buridan's Journal

4:27pm: the rhetorical point, for real..
Anyway, so this is the form of the argument I want to address:

"Liberals want to excuse people of their responsibilities. People like psychologists who determine causes to human behavior don't want to punish people, they want to coddle them."

First I want to say that this is a pretty misguided account of a lot of liberals I've met. But what's more interesting to me is the implication for psychology.

As an argument that's pretty weak. Even if you try to find external (environmental) causes for behavior, you can deal with those at the same time as you hold people responsible. The two views don't have to be at odds with each other.For example, we can fight poverty in the third world, and think about what cultural influences led to terrorism, and simultaneously fight terrorism.

What's more interesting is the paranoia that underlies this kind of an argument. Lets say that we were somehow able to explain all behavior. If that were the case, then we end up at exorcising the specter of free will, which is troubling indeed. So when I see this kind of argument, I see it (maybe this is giving them too much credit) as sort of a deep fear about eroding our concept of freedom.

Another reason why this strategy might be employed because certain uses really undermine a lot of dogmas that underlie the idea of America as a meritocracy. (There was a recent interview with Milton Friedman about this issue, though I can't recall where I read it) Imagine that we can find that there are environmental causes to violence which explains the plight of the inner cities (which I think are not far from being found, if they aren't found already). If that were true then we'd have to admit that things weren't equal for everyone, and that we'd need gun control or something (Yikes!)

There is clearly a huge minefield of issues here, both psychological and political. I bring this up because the line of research I'm getting into right now has to do with social and environmental factors that determine people's behavior. These experiments really challenge a lot of notions about the cognitive controls of our actions. (More on that at a later date)

3:36pm: A rhetorical strategy
I've encountered a particular form of argument, particularly some in some right-wing circles, that is relevant to other things I'm thinking about. Before I get to that, let me just say a brief brief thing about my political affiliations. I guess I'm a liberal, sort of. I mean, i say that because I'd never vote Republican. But by no means does that mean that I agree with a great typical liberal assumptions. It seems to me like there is a fundamental philosophic incoherence with both right-wing and left-wing discourses. Which should come as no surprise, I suppose, since the parties are both sort of a pastiche of ideologies, not so much a coherent thought out platform. Just to give two examples, (lets take one from the right and one from the left, though these might be stereotypical..):

1) Right wing types on individual responsibility. Their rhetoric about things like health care and retirement means to say that people should be trusted to make their own decision about their savings. On the other hand, they shouldn't be allowed to make the decision to smoke pot. I know the ultimate personal responsibility doctrine can be found among libertarians, which I respect as (albeit misguided) platform. But it seems completely arbitrary to trust people with some important decisions and not others.

2) Left-wing types tend to have a knee-jerk mistrust of high-capitalist institutions. A lot of them seem to have this mistrust in virtue of of them being capitalist. Yet somehow they trust government to solve all these problems! (particularly federal government!) Which seems paradoxical, because the same moral pressures that purportedly corrupt businesses simultaneously seem to corrupt government. If you take their mistrust to the natural conclusion, seems you would end up something of an anarchist (which is also pretty silly).

Anyway... so thats what I mean. The views that these political factions hold to me look like a melange of historically contingent ideas that haven't been terribly thought out.

Ok.. onto the rhetorical strategy.. um.. I guess in the post that follows..

1:01pm: idea in progress
All right... so I just spent the last two days looking for this idea, because it just seems so damn obvious, but I could not find it, so I am going to pretend like this is an idea I made up.

Lets start by explicating the distinction, to be found in the last section of Mill's utilitarianism, between act-utilitarianism and rule-utilitarianism. In the earlier chapters of the essay, Mill describes a system of ethics whose criteria hinge on whether particular actions maximize the happiness of all human beings. Following this, Mill then argues that instead of considering individual actions as maximizing happiness, one should think in terms of rules, that, if adopted, would maximize happiness. For example, it could be that lying to my mother about visiting the dentist maximizes happiness (and trust me, it does); however, if one were to adopt lying as a rule, then surely it would not promote human happiness. Its interesting to note the seeming congruence of rule-utilitarianism and the categorical imperative, but keep in mind that the methods for justification of those two moral maxims are pretty distinct. For Mill, the argument for rule-utilitarianism hingers on the fact that thinking of morality in terms of rules rather than individual actions on the whole will lead to more happiness. After all, thinking in terms of rules sets up the foundations of civil society...

Now, in decision theory, people for the most part think of the rationality of individual actions, i.e. what' actions do best in achieving one's goals. Of course there are alternatives to trying to pick the best actions (like satisficing, when information processing resources are scarce) and problems (particularly in sorting out what one's desires actually are). However, people don't seem to generally think about different accounts of rationality as generalized procedures. So why not make the distinction between rule-rationality versus act-rationality? In my view, this distinction does a lot of work. First of all, picking procedures shouldn't be a theoretical activity the way most competing claims of rationality generally are described. It should be in the empirical domain of psychology to go out and see what methods of reasoning work best for people. In fact, there is a ton of work on this already, though they tend to be pretty negative, describing mostly people's deviations from perfect rationality. (See Nisbet and Ross, the work of Kahneman and Tversky etc.) But in my view, you can make an even stronger set of claims. For that, we turn to evolution...

Thinking about evolution, one notices that generally, particular learned actions are not passed down from generation to generation. Rather, we inherit generalized pre-dispositions to courses of behavior. In fact, I would argue that we inherit something akin to procedures. For example, a baby coming into the world inherits a method of learning about the world which leads to language acquisition. Or the way our minds are wired to code objects in the world with valences (i.e. emotion, affect). All these things help us negotiate in our information-rich environments. In this way, we can see how we can partially identify that what is rule-rational for humans are precisely those set of procedures that have enabled us to survive through the last million years. (what better measure of success is there?)

Of course, this raises an obvious objection. The normative character of the concept of rationality is such that we can criticize certain behaviors. When someone wants to live a long life and then goes about smoking, we can say that this is not rational behavior. The immediate worry is that identifying the rational with procedures inherited via evolution and natural selection leaves no room for criticism. It ends up in the worst kind of social darwinism. To take a gross example, think about stereotyping. Stereotyping in terms of helping us get out of trouble and make quick decisions is evolutionarily speaking, very adaptive. Its better to overgeneralize that that huge beast over there is a bear and run away rather than take the time to figure out that it just looks like a bear, but really is just an elk. Of course, in modern life, this can often be a devastating method for jumping to conclusions about the world. (racism, genocide, etc.) We don't want to tie the adaptive procedures so closely with what is rational. Now, I think this objection highlights that using evolution as a guidepost one must be very careful. In giving normative assessments of procedures, one can start with the adaptive procedures, but then move on to examining which procedures are correct for the contexts in which we live today. The evolutionary history of a procedure is not, in and of itself, a means for its justification. Its merely a tool in understanding the genealogy of our reasoning. Having a genealogy of this kind is extremely useful in giving recommendations for procedures of thinking, of avoiding pitfalls like over generalizing stereotypes and the like.

The point of all this is simply this: thinking in terms of procedures shows how we can have a normative theory that takes into account empirical information about how we think without de facto justifying all our methods of reasoning.

1:30pm: Books, etc.
Ok, so I did not post my thoughts on various readings yesterday afternoon as promised.
I am a bad blogger.
I vow to all of you now not to make promises about blogging anymore.

However, I guess I can now post a few things about things I've been reading....

Some time ago I finished Carl Becker's The Heavenly City of the 18th Century Philosophers. It was a fine read; I don't have much to say about the central thesis of the book about the prejudices of the Enlightenment philosophes. I don't find that particularly surprising (maybe its because Becker was so convincing), but it didn't give me a clue about the question that was motivating me. Namely, the Frankfurt school people point out this duplicity in the typical "think for yourself, be rational" mantra of the Enlightenment, but they don't provide mechanism for the adoption of this ideology. It seems to be after reading a lot about the French Enlightenment that the apotheosis of that maxim really doesn't happen in France (more about this in a moment), but maybe has its cause in the German Enlightenment (Kant, in particular). Maybe there is evidence of this sooner; I am going to keep hunting. But even finding the earliest instances of this ideology doesn't answer the question... what I really want to know is why this idea took hold. In particular, there has to be a transition in how people conceived of themselves and their place in the world. Darnton's Great Cat Massacre convinced me of this. The Great Cat Massacre was an incredible read. What the Great Cat Massacre provided was a snapshot of a moment of transition in the French mind. But what it lacked was a discussion of transition, dynamism, change. It points out a few hints, but nothing that answers the fundamental question I am concerned with. The best part of the book, I thought, was the methodology Darnton outlines for beginning an investigation into "mentalite." Namely, his starting point is always one where one cannot assimilate the stated reasons or motivations for peoples' action into the square categories of our modern ways of thinking. So, for example, the eponymous chapter on the Cat Massacre, what drives him in his inability to understand what is so funny about mutilating and torturing a bunch of cats. Its like that old adage that one is not truly fluent in a language until one can understand the jokes. Anyway, I started reading Dena Goodman's book on the Republic of Letters. Its interesting in its approach (the emergence of a institution of ideas, essentially), but I think I am barking up the wrong tree looking at the French.

One more thing about Becker was his description in the final chapter of human beings modifying their concepts of time to suit their predictive needs. If memory serves, he was saying that humans are the only creatures with the ability to expand and contract their horizons of possibility. For example, we can think of "Now" as the unit of one second, or today, or this century, or this eon, etc. We expand and contract our temporal concepts in order to put into perspective the kinds of statements we want to say about our past and future. This is a pretty elegant way to think about prediction. I have been thinking a great deal about prediction generally. First off, there is the role of prediction in evolution in Dennett's Freedom Evolves (a very interesting book, I highly recommend it). The basic claim he makes is that our typical gripes about freedom and free will are really red herrings. (So he does a bunch of Wittgensteinian magic to cure us of our misunderstandings of language). He says that instead freedom is all about being able to survive and thrive with an increasingly minimal amount of dependence on the circumstances of our environment. So humans, being the most adaptable to changes in circumstances are the most free. The modularity and flexibility of our minds via evolution is the source of our freedom. Now, in that way, Becker's idea of temporal modification fits nicely as one of the abilities that humans have that enable them to have "freedom."

This also connects up to things that I have been encountering in my day job in genetics. What everyone is all flipped out about in genetics (and in fact in a great deal of biology) is that our traditional analyses of causation and prediction really break down because the variables in our problems and the interactions between the parts make sorting out causality impossible, and prediction extremely difficult. I get the feeling in science that we are reaching the point where we can say a great deal about one variable (an atom, lets say) or maybe even a small number of these variables interacting, but when we want to say something about real life with its conglomeration of stuff, all our predictive models get all confounded. Prediction is in trouble, seems to me.

Lets see.. what else? Still reading Montaigne, about to return from the hiatus. I have been reading the Mumon Ekai (Gateless Gate), the great compendium of koans. I had a long conversation with my insane friend A about koans and the triteness of Buddhism. There is still a lot of wisdom even if its been "new ageified" and now used to coach NBA players and the like. And there is a conceptual depth that I think is missing from the layperson understanding of Buddhism. (In my insane theories, Buddhism has a lot to do with certain psychological processes that make culture possible and necessary, but that’s the subject of another long post). Anyway, this whole thing makes me think of the general problems of the connoisseur. Many of my friends are collector types, in a manner of speaking. Listening to and knowing about a multitude of bands, reading thousands of books, being able to name many different perfumes by smell, etc. Anyway, such people oftentimes encounter an object of their fancy that is simultaneously popular to the masses. (for example, someone I know loves Van Gogh, even though many of the people who love Van Gogh are idiots). Of course, people like this don't want to be lumped with all the foolios, but you like what you like. Anyway, I think part of being a real lover of the object of collection is being able to accept the quality of some things in the public's imagination. Just because everyone likes it, doesn't mean it sucks. Harry Potter might be good, for all I know (some of my smarter friends seem to think so). I want to try and not poo poo trendy things of the moment...

Anyway, that’s it for now. I wanted to say something about Charles Johnson's Ox Herding Tale, but I don't feel like talking about Hegel and more Buddhism. It’s a good book though, people!

11:38am:

I know I haven't posted anything in a long time. I will attempt to make up for this today. Here are some of my thoughts from the last month or so. . .

1) Phish was fantastic, but for none of the reasons that I had thought it would be. As you might imagine from the above image, this will be the last Phish show that I will be attending. Aside from the massive amounts of traffic, the dirt, the hippies, the music was not nearly as good as it had been in the past. Since the band reunited after their hiatus, they have been playing a ton of stuff from their new album (Round Room, and I will not be providing a link to it). That music, frankly, blows. The problem with the band, the way my friends and I see it, is the way in which it is too Trey-centered now. (the guitarist). When you hear their new music its not coherent and overwhelmed by Trey's guitar stylings. Not that he isn't a great guitar player, but part of the reason we liked the band so much was the way in which the band was balanced. The jams now are largely aimless and meandering; the new music substitutes self-indulgence, noodling and excess for the organic quality of their earlier material. Don't get me wrong, when they play their old material, they sound every bit as good as they used to (mostly). We left second night show after the first set, figuring that we weren't going to miss much and we could listen to the show on the radio (they were broadcasting it in a 100 mile radius). We had a much better time rocking out on our own under the beautiful Vermont stars than we would had previously among 70,000 stinky youths. So if its more about the friends than the concerts, we can just go hang out instead of driving 2500 miles in 4 days.

phew, that was way more than I intended to write about this. Ok, onto to other developments...

2) My friend robosubrosa and I invented two games which I will share:

Traverse the Person Tree - Essentially, this is a modified form of 20 questions. One person thinks of someone and the other person asks them 20 questions. The trick is that the questions are in a different language (like Russian) that the person cannot understand. So he essentially answers 20 questions randomly and so the categories of people are traversed at "random." The people are compared at the end and hilarity ensues. Maybe you can't be sober playing this game. Hmm. . .

Decentralized Mail - We are very excited about this idea. People have heard of this method of transmitting TCP packets via carrier pigeon. Well, what about UDP? So we were in the show, surrounded by 60,000 people, and we had the following idea. We were handing out ... candies (they weren't really candies, I think you can guess what we were handing out.) And we wanted to see how far through the network of 60,000 people we could get the candy passed. So we watched as the candy moved from person to person initially. Then we had the idea of trying to get a candy passed all the way up to the band itself. (Its kind of like a random walk, or the game of Plinko) Anyway, as we were leaving the concert early, we didn't have time to test our theory. Also, I had the idea of enclosing a note with instructions on how to pass. As robosubrosa put it, we wanted to find the shortest number of instructions that would get a note passed. So we basically said that we wanted the candy passed with the intent of getting it all the way up front. Before we left, we ran into a guy whose tent I helped put up, and we told him of the plan. He was so taken by it that he took 3 copies of note and 3 candies and left to go try it from 30, 20 and 10 rows back. I am waiting for an email from him to let me know how it went. Anyway, this idea brought forth another idea.. the idea of decentralized mail. Lets say you have a package that you want sent to someone. You don't terribly care how long it takes, and furthermore, you are willing to deal with the possibility that the package will never reach its destination. So, you give the package to a friend, and you say "when you happen to be going in the direction of person X, you give this package to some other friend of yours." And based on this simple rule you see how long and what path it takes to get to the friend. Notice, this is like sending a packet via UDP (for those of you computer science types). Its connectionless, no error checking, no guarantee of destination, but you could theoretically send a lot more stuff over than using carrier pigeon and waiting for confirmation that the package/packet was sent. Anyway, robosubrosa and I intend to test the system sometime soon. Anyone traveling in the direction of Boston from Ann Arbor?

The next post will be about books, ideas, etc. (I will post it this afternoon)

10:33am: friendster


This is my idea basically for friendster... for those of you that don't know, friendster is a website that lets you put up profile/pictures and say who your friends are (who also have profiles) their friends do the same, and then you are able to surf around and see all the different people you are networked to.

You basically have little parties at people's houses. so you advertise your address as a bar on some given night for a certain number of hours. (like 1am-3am). and you put it up on your friendster profile. now, anyone can come over who is connected to you by say, 3 degrees. and then later on, they do the same thing (have little parties). so when people come over to your house, they get to have drinks and you can even put out a little food (in the guise of leftovers). You also get to meet the friends of your friends' friends. now the effect of this is that you may also become friends with them, thus adding to your friendster profile. if this would work (little strings of underground bar/party) then the results would be:
a) youd have many cool exclusive places to go for drinks
b) youd make more friends... the result of which is that you add them to your friendster profile. in this way, the social network which could be loosely connected becomes much more dense.. in effect, if this plan works, then we change the network topology of friendster, and we bring the world together!

10:26am: This is just a test.
Of a notification system I just set up. Pay no attention to this.

9:56am: Selfishness


Lets see, today is the first day of IM exile. (Its on at home for anyone who wants to leave me a consoling message).

So last night I was talking to my friend M, and we were talking about the motivation for action. I asked him whether he thought that all actions were done out of self interest. He thought for a long time, and finally said, that yes, they must be. I argued that sometimes people act out of altruism or a higher purpose or for reasons other then self interest. He ran the standard "well, you are always getting something out of your good deeds, like the satisfaction of doing right." Its like Nozick's argument about the Experience Machine... if you could get that feeling of having done good for others, would you really find it important that you actually did good? I'm inclined to think that you want the experience itself, not just the feeling from the experience. What was more interesting to me was his insistence in the dogma of selfish action, that even when faced with countervailing arguments, he wanted to cling to his belief. The reason I find this interesting is that it seems like a world in which we act only in self interest no matter what is one that conforms to capitalist conception of human nature. I just wanted to point out to him that this conception of motivation is not obviously or trivially true.

Speaking of which, as anyone read Pinker's Blank Slate? Where do people stand on this human nature business?

3:38pm: Responses
As for tmhopscotch's latest comments regarding AI, let me just note one thing. (I think we actually agree on everything else). It does seem feasible to imagine that a computer would interact with their environment to learn instead of taking direct instructions from a programmers brain. Anyway, just be careful here. It seems like one could imagine a programmer's brain as an environment. Its just not an environment that is of the requisite kind. You say that the computer just learned based on the environment that the programmer interacted with, but isn't that how many of our opinions of the world are formed? Don't we also form beliefs based on the beliefs of others? I think you need to say a bit more about what is requisite for artificial life. I have some thoughts myself, but I prefer arguing against your thoughts first. :-)

Ok, also... down below I said once that I would answer the "who cares" question for the concept of rationality...

His reply was "clearly if you change the conception of rationality, its not going to matter. People are either going to stick to their folk theories like they already do, or a few irrelevant academics might change their mind."

My answer to this is essentially a question... namely, where do these folk theories of rationality come from? They aren't cuturally universal. They are bound to our particular historical moment, which is itself a product of some academic types a few hundred years ago. An interesting question is how their ideas became today's folk theories? (I am reading about the Enlightenment to try and figure that part out). But more importantly, it demonstrates the possibility of influencing ideology. Its not clear to me how the dynamics of this influence would work (another question I am trying to answer), but when one starts to think about how this folk theory is pernicious, then one sees the value in trying to change it. The philosophical doctrine of rationality is all about justifying capitalism (you can go read some Critical Theory to get into that), and the folk theory (control your emotions) is just a way of standardizing forms of social interaction in culture. But the former doctrine, insofar as it is ingrained in academics, is also engrained into how governmental institutions, social programs, and media are all presented. And setting up all those things under more accurate conceptions of human decision making seems pretty worthwhile to me.

1:15pm: Lost pants


Of all the serious things I could have posted about first, I suppose I will tell this pants story first, as it amuses me.

Ok, so a long time ago over spring break I was visiting my friends in Chicago for a tournament, and then going back to Milwaukee, and then returning to Ann Arbor. During the trip, I (seemingly) had brought two pairs of dress pants that I own (the two best pair). So, upon my arrival in Ann Arbor, I look in my suitcase, and lo and behold! No pants! Figuring I had left them with my friends or family, I then proceeded to call Milwaukee, Chicago, and Washington DC (maybe they were mispacked by my roommate who was going to DC after Chicago). No one had seen anything of my pants. I became very distressed. Then, finally heeding some advice, I check the hamper, and of course, there they were.

Once I had to tell people in 3 cities that my pants had been located, naturally, I was the subject of some ridicule.

Until yesterday.

Yesterday I received a call from E's fiancee (E being my roommate who is from DC) asking me to locate a pair of pants of his. I searched his closet, but to no avail. Phone calls were made, relayed, a long time passed. And then, in the evening, i get a call from A (E's fiancee) informing me... (I'm sure you can surmise where this is going) that he found his pants in his hamper in DC.

VINDICATION!!!

11:15am: Announcement


Just to let people know, instant messenger has been officially banned from my work place. As a result, there will most likely be a proliferation of blogging.

Also, I have comments for many of the recent comments and much to say regarding several subjects, including, but not exclusively: AI and cognition, the idea of nature in the Enlightenment, Carl Becker, Karl Reinhold encyclopedia entry, and lost pants.

4:07pm: Emotions and Cognition


Ok, prompted in part by tmhopscotch, and by my promise to do, I'm going to give a short account of the ubiquity of emotions in decision-making, and try to give a kind of explanation for why they are necessary. This account will differ slightly from the more standard accounts of emotions in cognition, including one I already gave in my discussion of Paul Thagard's paper. I am instead going to characterize emotions in the mind as solving a problem of economy. This problem of economy is best understood via illustration of the "skeptical problem of rationality."

If one attempts to be rational in one's decision-making, this requires that one follow a kind of procedure (which I've already described). Unfortunately, in real life, the possible space of decisions is enormous. For this reason, in most cases, by the time one considered all of the possible options to pick the optimal, the window for decision-making would be past. (This is part of why, Herbert Simon talks about humans not as maximizers, but as satisficers, i.e. going with the first solution they can find that meets the minimum requirements for fulfilling desire). So it is required that rational agents have stopping rules that tell them the optimal point at which to stop deliberating and make a decision. But what is the basis for this stopping rule? An ideal stopping rule enables a rational agent to search the space of possible solutions in minimal time and find the optimal. Of course, without some kind of deus ex machina, its hard to imagine that there is any general stopping rule like this. So it is required that the agent deliberate about when to stop deliberating. This, however, also needs to stop at some point (sadly, all this deliberation takes time), so we need another stopping rule. One can quickly see how there’s an infinite regress. This leaves two choices: either you have a stopping rule that is a heuristic and isn't based on ideal reasons, or you deliberate until the cows come home. Either way, you don't seem to be conforming to the standards of rationality.

What does this have to do with emotions? Well, since most decisions in real life have many possibilities, the brain can't afford to be "rational" but instead requires things to be coded heuristically. And that coding is precisely what emotions are.

And in response to tmhopscotch, in my view, you don't need cultural or social situatedness to have emotions. But emotions are only possible as markers for quicker decisions if the there is some end that decisions are for. That is, the factor of motivation is the key part of the content of our emotional lives. But this isn't some kind of black box thing, one could easily imagine how a computer could be goal oriented in the appropriate way to have emotions. I personally, just don't really see the point in doing so. And also, this social and cultural argument strikes me as weird. I tend to be slightly skeptical of arguments of that sort. (I kind of think of them as akin to philosophical arguments about why the earth is at the center of the universe.. wholly irrelevant)

Also, the office copy of Numerical Recipes in C++ just arrived! I am such a dork.

11:27am: Question
To all you readers of my blog (all 2 of you, or whatever), can you tell me everything you know about Karl Lowith? I read an article today about Gadamer that was by that guy who wrote Heidegger's Children (did anyone read that? Is it worthwhile?. Anyway, I went and read all about Hans Jonas, and then couldn't find detailed info on Karl Lowith (I got tired of wading through google pages.)

Also, I'm reading Carl Becker's The Heavenly City of the 18th Century Philosophers. (I'm also finishing Midnight's Children, finally). Lets see if I can trust a cat (wallacecat) to give book recommendations.

Also, I read the first section of Picard's Affective Computing. I'm too lazy to provide the link, but the U of M library has an online copy, which is cool. Anyway, it was very interesting. The idea is that since emotions are integral and necessary to judgments (more on that in an upcoming post today, if I feel like it), we should try to integrate emotional intelligence to computers. I got word from a certain psych professor that I work for that it might not be quite what I'm looking for. Which may be true, as most of the book is devoted to getting computers to be able to recognize emotions via sophisticated pattern recognition, etc. Thats an interested problem, to be sure, but in the larger scheme of things, is another interesting problem that I do not care about. I suppose we all have our obsessions. Its still really cool to see how people's notions of human decision making are becoming more informed by reality.

4:12pm: Deconstruction and Analytic Philosophy
I know by the subject line that you are probably expecting some tired rehash of how they are at odds with each other, have similar/different pictures of language, academic politics, etc. Well fuck that! I was just thinking about several recent conversations with English grad student friends E and C, and also with a conversation I had with my friend A (who is now a professor, not that this lends credence to anything he says) several years ago.

Anyway, all those years ago he and I were discussing analytic philosophy, and he was chiding me. His point was that analytic philosophy encourages one to be on the fence about foundational questions about ethics, metaphysics whatever. So you spend your time unsure about moral judgments. This, he claimed, was in service to the entrenched systems of oppression, as occupying your time thinking about these theoretical issues lead you to nonaction. Deconstruction, on the surface of it, (so say many) is different in the sense that deconstructing these texts leads to to understand whats marginalized, biased, contradictory. Its showing the ambiguity of meaning in texts, and often (with the post colonial angle) meant to help reclaim the ideas for the oppressed.

So I was discussing aspects of my research (critique of the Enlightenment, human nature, decision making, etc) and outlining ways of making life "better" and C immediately pounced on me, saying that all theories were value-laded, making things "better" would still screw someone over etc. Many of her skeptical concerns were useful to think about, but I noted that eventually you had to put them aside and do something. So this got me thinking more about deconstruction. On the surface it seems like a great thing to help the oppressed, but the more I think about, the more I realize that deconstruction is co-opted by the existing social order the exact same way. Its skeptical perspective is great for tearing down systems, but leaves you with no perspective from which to build up anything. (I guess thats why its called de-construction). Its almost like a deconstruction of deconstruction. It tries to do something (help the oppressed), but instead it does nothing at all.

Maybe this is a property of all theory?

5:51pm: For no particular reason.
For no particular reason I would like to note that today I walked home in the rain, and after trying to avoid being soaked for 10 minutes, i realized it was hopeless so I opened my mouth and looked to the sky and tried to at least decide where the water hits me.

3:21pm: Note to Self
Think about how to mediate the link between questions of political economy and information. Vis a vis the last post regarding learning and autonomy and control.

1:48pm: Autonomy
Ok, this is going to sound like a rehash of Foucault, maybe. I'm sure someone has come up with what I'm about to say, but I'm going to write it down anyway so that I remember to figure out who said this later. (It smacks of Frankfurt school too, except for a few crucial parts)

As I was walking to a party yesterday, I was thinking about habituation, learning, and autonomy. First of all, I was thinking about how all these large cultural and social forces seem to work to limit the amount of freedom that people face in making decisions about their life. (Clearly communism and fascism were two systems where decision making was constrained). Now with capitalism you have the common critique that it represents a total dominating ideology within which freedom in a sense is constrained. The common argument is that the very nature of capitalism implies this; all human activity is subsumed under the rubric of satisfying desires (all human activity has to be selfish in some sense, right?!). But I was thinking more along institutional lines. In communism, for example, the institutions that limit autonomy are clearly identified as governmental institutions. In capitalism, by contrast, the system is set up to prevent excessive injunctions on your autonomy by individuals or by government (libertarians and republicans are really worried about government meddling, after all). However, the power and domination, in a sense, found a way around the injunctions, and now these institutions manifest themselves in terms of business. (Business controls government via money, and controls media, i.e. the mechanisms of information dissemination in our culture) Other people have talked a lot more about businesses, so I will not reiterate this whole point. But what I am much more interested in is the how and the why. Why do institutions of control arise? What dynamics lead to it?

My point is to identify the historical tendency for these tools of domination to arise with certain facts about the human psychological makeup. William James on habituation talks about the effect of learning on skill performance. Think about learning to drive a car. At first, you have to focus and think about every part of the activity ,After a long time, you no longer have to think about driving, you can occupy your mind with other things. More generally, the process of learning backs automatic what was once beholden to conscious process. So in a sense, it becomes a matter of simply initiating the procedure (loading the driving program, as it were). So as a general process learning implies removing facets of your activity from conscious control. In the same way, culture provides a shortcut for knowing what to do in society. When you are out in a public space, you don't have to think about the proper way to act; instead, society provides the groundwork for action. In constraining the search space for activities, you can easily see how this implies a loss of autonomy. Not necessarily in a bad way, mind you, but simply that the way our minds learn drive ourselves to shrink down representation and free the mind.

In this way, you can see the dynamics of power and domination as emergent based on the phenomenon of habituation. Institutions of control are readily acceptable because it appeals to human faculties of learning. The question of my mind is how the microdynamics of learning scale up to the macro level cultural institutions.

2:02pm: Three dogmas of empiricism
First off, I am reading "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" right now, and I will be posting stuff about it later.

Second, the third dogma is that my stomach is of an acceptible size. While not large, it is no longer flat. This is unacceptable. Steps are being taken. Stay tuned.

1:22pm: Co-evolution
I was struck by two things last night. I have no shining insight into either of these two things, as they are rather obvious, but I'm going to share them anyway.

I was sitting and watching the NBA playoffs, and I suddenly had this feeling coming over me, this paranoid suspicion that I was horribly ill and in the process of dying. Then I started thinking about illness more, (mind you, I haven't been for a regular checkup since the end of high school), I started cataloguing all the things that were "wrong" with me physically. Cuts, bruises, pimples, sores, etc. When you list them all out like that, it can be kind of frightening. Then it struck me, not that I had some illness that was going to kill me this month or this year, but that life itself was an illness, that we are gradually creeping towards death. What struck me what the contrast between myself and the basketball players, their health monitored and calibrated by teams of professionals. Who managed my health? I guess its hard to fuck up that much, as I'm still alive, but damn, we could all be doing a better job of it.

The second thing that randomly struck me yesterday was the dialectical theory of the progression of history (be it the Hegelian or the Marxist variety). The standard line (I think the actual terms "thesis-antithesis synthesis" comes from some other Hegelian.. Schelling? Fichte?) is that things in history arise in opposition to other things, and then there is some kind of fusion of the opposites. Anyway, my thought was just that the thesis-antithesis part reminds me a lot of co-evolution, and using these sets of concepts to understand certain historical events really resonates. In a typical co-evolutionary system, two living things evolve in adaptation to the threat produced by the other. (This is not the same thing as predator-prey models, which are about population dynamics). Anyway, so imagine an animal evolving spikes to deal with a predator, who then evolves a long snout to go beyond the spikes. Anyway, this process of feedback seems in my mind to characterize all sorts of things. So, thinking about my own work, which tries to undermine the Enlightenment, you can see that as part of a thread of concepts that arose in response to the Enlightenment (like Islamic fundamentalism). Anyway, the way that everything is a reaction to something.. its totally obvious I think, but seeing it in terms of coevolution of dialectic just really engaged me.

Anyway, on a completely different note.. lets say you took a pill that made the aging process stop. How long do you think you would have to live before you would die in some kind of freak rare occurrence, given that you lived so long the low frequency events are possible. In other words, how long can you live before tempting the fates and getting yourself killed in a plane crash, a errant shot of a potato gun, a straw up your nose, etc?

10:17am: Ladies and Gentlemen, Yuri Andropov


You'll have to pardon the syntax, grammar and... well, the content too I suppose. I found out around 11:30 last night that there was beer in the margaritas. This stunning revelation helped me get closer to the truth of my mental state. Anyway...

To Chris: Chalmers is dropped. As for science, I guess its a good idea. All I meant to say was that its progress doesn't work monolithically. (I guess that’s a very well known point, thanks Kuhn, you bastard).

I'm surveying a cognitive science encyclopedia right now. I will have things to say about it in the upcoming weeks, but nothing for right now.

So I'm going to tell you why I think poker is an interesting game (I've been reading a lot about poker theory of late):
1) Calculating the probability of making a hand and winning it compared to the amount of money required to bet in order to stay in the game gives you an "ideal" long-term strategy for winning. Getting a feel for the mathematical possibilities of the game is challenging.
2) Playing that strategy all the time leads to long term losses because other players can capitalize on that strategy to steal (bluff) a bunch of pots off of you. So there is this entire game-theoretic element to it, where players actions have feedback.
3) Reading people's hands via understanding their body language. This adds a whole other element to the game where observation and understanding of the human psyche pays off.

As for women...

2:48pm: Ontology Ontoschmogeny
Ok, Chris- (comments to be found here)

First on part 1-
The only point of disagreement I have with you is how you characterize Chalmers' argument. From my understanding of it, Chalmers is advancing a form of dualism; in particular, in the latter chapters he argues that consciousness is like a 5th fundamental force in the universe. Wouldn't that mean that consciousness pervades everything, in Chalmers view? Why yes, yes that is what it would mean. He is in fact a panpsychist. So I think you are right to say that Chalmers doesn't quite endorse dualism per say, but he does endorse some form of it. (Incidentally, I totally agree with you about Cartesian perspective not informing psychology, except insofar as phenomenology follows something like Descartes method of doubt and that many psychologists took phenomenology as their inspiration.) And you are probably right that when push comes to shove, these scientists are probably all monists, or at least belief in the reduction of mental states to physical states. But I would be loath to characterize all psychologists with this claim. The professor I work for, by contrast, seems to endorse a very pragmatic attitude, basically saying, "It doesn't really matter if phenomenal and physical properties are distinct, because we can find out a lot of stuff right now without worry about that." I think I'm somewhat of an elimitivist when it comes to these questions. I'm not sure what we get from endorsing some kind of dualism or monism in this case. In fact, I would make an even stronger claim, that the entire question of monism or dualism is really based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how our consciousness operates. It is based on the flaw that somehow we have this unlimited introspection into our mental states. And, as crazy as it sounds, I just don't buy that. Consciousness operates on a much more fragmentary basis.

On part 2:
You are probably right that dualism handicaps us. I hint at that somewhat in my above comments. I have a lot to say about the structure of scientific discovery based on a meeting I had yesterday, but its not directly relevant. I'll just say one thing. Science is great and all, but I think its a mistake to think of science as this glacial progression of the "best theories we have so far." I mean, that’s true, in a way, but at the same time, you have to consider that certain pieces of knowledge are remembered or forgotten based on very human causes, not necessarily based on their truth or untruth. For example, we have no idea how the pyramids were built, nor does anyone alive today have the skill to build the kind of steel mortar guns used in WWI (so I'm told). Our capacity to saving information across generations has been limited. Of course, with the internet, now that’s starting to change; however, with everything being archived, now there becomes a totally different informational problem, namely retrieval.

Anyway, that’s all I have to say about that.

9:28am: An update!
Ok, I will be updating my blog this afternoon... Topics to be considered include
1) Another reply to Chris on ontology
2) Some comments on women
3) Some cognitive science stuff, maybe.

2:46pm: Sentence Fragments Be Damned.
On a slightly less grammatical note. (cue everything I've ever written.)

9:27am: boring boring
Greetings ladies and gentlemen.

I would surmise that many of you know what I've been up. Furthermore, many of you know why I might have been not updating the blog. Suffice it to say, losing sucks. Just a brief word on this. This is like a bad breakup. I know that sounds insane, but that’s how it feels. It keeps going through my head everything that went wrong, and wishing I could do something about it. Clearly, I cannot. There, I just talked about my feelings. Fuck you, blog.

On a slightly, more grammatical note. Chris, why don't you get comments going on your blog? I have many things to say about that Spinoza inspired fellow Antonio Damasio. In fact, I read his book. (Descartes Error). It was terribly good. As the article in the Times points out, he’s a James-Lange retread. The way that he puts emotions at the forefront of cognition is admirable. He is right that affect plays a central role in reasoning, he's just wrong in exactly how that is supposed to work. I talked about match/mismatch as a factor in an earlier post.

As for the ontological aspect of it. I hate to say this, but I doubt that any of these neuroscientist types really think about it in terms of ontology. When I was taking my first graduate psych course, I asked my professor about Jackson's paradox. Its the one that’s supposed to push dualism. A woman studies color vision her whole life, but she has been denied any actual color objects. Everything in her enclosed world is given to her in black and white. Finally, after years of neurological study of color vision, presumably knowing everything there is to know about how people see color, she is given a red apple. She exclaims, "Wow, this is what its like see red!" So clearly the "what its like" (aka the qualia) is a new fact that she learns, distinct from the physical she learned in her color vision. So clearly the phenomenal facts are different from the physical ones. So clearly dualism is true. Clearly. Anyway, my psych professor looks at me like I'm totally crazy and he says, "what does it matter if there are phenomenal properties or not?" And that, my friends, was indeed a good question. I could not answer it. Perhaps you have a better answer.

This reminds me of Andrew's question to all this stuff about rationality. His reply was "clearly if you change the conception of rationality, its not going to matter. People are either going to stick to their folk theories like they already do, or a few irrelevant academics might change their mind." I do have a rather lengthy reply to this. I will answer it as some point in the near future.

Anyway, the "who cares?" move in an argument is something that many philosophers would dread, I'd imagine. However, the more its applied, the more I like it. I think in these sorts of abstruse speculations, it can be grounding. There was a zen master who used to give a thumbs up sign to students at opportune moments to induce enlightenment (I'm not making this up). That unexpected who cares I think can be equally enlightening. So Chris, dualist or monist ontology.. who cares?

Also, I'm debating on what I should read next... War of the End of the World, Midnight's Children, The Physiology of Taste, The Middle Passage (Charles Johnson, an Ezequiel fav), The Historical-Critical Dictionary, or something else... I want some book suggestions! I know you people are really well read, so tell me.

10:59pm: the game is over people!
Sorry...

LSW played the game before any of you had the chance. He won by figuring out that the answer was Alexis Meinong.

Do people want to play again?