Pursuing praxis

April 30, 2006

How I think, no. 2

Filed under: Personal, Speculation

Thinking recently about what facilitates my thought, what spurs it, prompts it, helps tear an identification out of the nameless network, I have as yet only observations, not so much as an hypothesis.

I notice that reading and writing engage an entirely different part of my mind than speaking and listening. Furthermore, these four function best when ordered like this: read, write, speak, listen. But there is a huge gulf between reading and writing. Indeed, that’s a majority of the entire process of thinking, for me. If I can take someone else’s words, connect them into a series of ideas well enough such that I get what he’s talking about, then the ideas become my own, integrating themselves into my mind, and I discover my own words for them; I independently identify those concepts. This leads to writing. Once I can identify, in my own words, the ideas, I can find my words, I can string them together and look at the ordering and content of my thought more explicitly, which leads to writing.

Writing helps me think. Somehow it’s a function of time; by taking the time to write, by having to think ahead and organize my thought in order to communicate it, I improve the organization of that thought in my mind. There is little impetus to do this if I’m never asked to communicate it to another person; I can continue intuiting the meaning for my audience of one till kingdom come. I suppose it’s part of the reason I love teaching, or vice versa. I like the opportunity to convey important ideas, and to do it succinctly and comprehensibly, because ideas are cool, and they’re usually free, and it’s beautiful to revel in an idea with another person, even in a lightbulb-going-on kind of way.

By the time I can write about it coherently, i.e. can write a persuasive essay on the topic, I’m ready to speak about it. Of course, I often do (or must) speak before I’m really ready to. It’s hard to think new thoughts and immediately translate them into words, and speak coherently. But it’s only when I’m fully prepared to speak that I can carry on a truly productive conversation, because I have all my tools readily at hand, as it were; my ideas are already formed, and I can immediately compare, contrast, evaluate, integrate, in real time. It is really difficult to do this when I barely have the words for the things I’m thinking. And only after I’m prepared to speak, and have spoken, am I really ready to listen.

I think listening requires a back-tracking of my regular, and more comfortable, concept formation and evaluation. I have to identify within each sentence the terms being related, and often the terms are complicated and contain relations themselves. I have to - with considerable effort - hand on to multi-part terms long enough to relate them, and then relate sentences to sentences, and then abstract (again, in real-time) the direction and message of the entire conversation. It’s a lot of work, particularly when I don’t have an existing framework for many of the terms and ideas. But if I do, then they feed back around, like reading, and the whole thing can start again.

Another thought: identification is the hardest step on the road to knowledge. It’s so hard to identify things, especially when they lurk behind feelings or more familiar facades. To trace down, by feeling, to the base of the ungraspable problem and identify what that thing is that’s making this confusing bush of thought, is extraordinarily hard. Getting purchase on any edge, any corner of it, is the rate-limiting step to unwrapping and engaging this first mover of things.

Finally: I notice that movement and thinking are quite closely connected for me, and I think it goes beyond a quick dismissal of the mind-body dichotomy. There’s that, but there’s more. In fact, I am most motivated to think, and am thinking best, when I construe it in physical terms. I talk about wrangling with ideas, and nailing them down, and the conflict and battle and war of ideas, of meshing and repulsion and intertwining and dancing, of thoughts exploding and minds imploding, of philosophers as kings and poets and warriors. I catch myself singing along with my thinking, and dancing in my chair, and I get the itch to play piano, as though I can’t merely hold an idea and know it, that I have to get it out to know it best, to see it and revel in it and look at it from all around; as conduit and composer, together. And when the ideas are speeding along, gathering in size and momentum and threatening to overtake me, all I can think is, “Run.” Run to it, run to know, run to feel, run to regain control, run to even the tempo and mete the volume.

Conversely, I catch myself thinking while doing kinetic things, like walking or playing piano or doing something with my hands, like painting a wall or kneading dough or wrapping a present. But it’s a different sort of thinking, a dilated, searching-around kind, like just before or just after sleeping, where I’m looking for loose ends and things that should go together, little inconsistencies that might be the beginning of something bigger. I find that to think I’ll play piano, and though I need the music in front of me to play, I’m not reading the notes at all, but thinking or dreaming or searching or reading words. But realizing this breaks it, it’s a snapping-to, and I have to start all over by deliberately reading the notes again. It’s a process with a definite starting point. I also notice that during all this, I cannot speak. I can’t even chew gum, not even in rhythm with the music, although I can tap with one foot and pedal with another. I would even have difficulty explaining afterwards what exactly I was thinking. Somehow the speaking part of my brain is almost completely turned off.

All this is observation. I don’t know why it’s like this. But observation isn’t useless, even in the absence of working hypotheses. Knowing that something works, however it does, can be a useful thing. I can seek out the things to do and the things to think in order to spur further thought – either more, or better, or clearer. And stamping out clarity over eight miles of purposeful steps becomes an easy means to a very difficult end: the answers to “What is it?” and "Why is it that way?"

Negativity

Filed under: Quotes, Logic

From HWB "Talking nonsense is not thinking" Joseph. pgs 41-46

"There is a certain difficulty in the notion of a negative term, and in the account merely the absence of a quality. The Irishman’s receipt [recipe?] for making a gun, to take a hole and pour iron round it, is not more difficult to execute, than it would be to frame a term whose meaning consisted simply in the fact that a particular quality was not meant. A term must have some positive meaning, in order to be a term at all.

"It is indeed sometimes said that a negative term includes in its meaning whatever is not meant by the corresponding positive term. According to this view, there is no positive term to which we may not frame a corresponding negative; to man there corresponds not-man, to book not-book, to square not-square, to colour not-colour; not-man is everything which is not man, and includes therefore not only the other animal species, but plants and minerals, books and institutions, birth and immortality; not-book includes all these but books, and man besides; and so forth. The two ‘contradictory’ terms, (as they are called) comprise between them all that is; nothing can be conceived, of which one or the other is not predicable; and they divide the universe between them. What the positive term is, does not matter; for whatever it be, the negative term covers everything else; and therefore it may be expressed by a symbol; let A represent any term, and non-A its contradictory; we may then say that A and not-A between them make up all that is, or that there is nothing of which one or the other may not be predicated. ‘Everything is either A or not-A.’

"Such negative terms as these do not really figure in our thought; they are ‘mere figments of logic’; …

"The invention of such terms however is explained when we remember the relation of a term to judgment. The latter, as we have seen, is the primitive and remains the complete act of thought, and terms are got by abstraction from it. Now the affirmative judgment ‘All flesh is grass’ may be resolved into the terms flesh (the subject) and grass (the predicate affirmed of it); and the negative judgment ‘Man is not a fly’ into the terms man (the subject) and fly (the predicate denied of it). But since we do therein affirm that man is not a fly, it seems possible to say that the predicate, not a fly, is affirmed of man, as well as that the predicate fly is denied of him. This attempt to reduce negative and affirmative judgments to a common affirmative type, by throwing the negative into the predicate, is not really defensible, for the negative term not a fly does not signify the nature of anything, and so is not really a term; it should, if it were a general term covering everything except the corresponding positive, be predicable of all subjects except flies in the same sense; but there is no common character in all these which it is intended to signify. Hence, as we should not take the trouble to affirm of man nothing in particular, the only point of the judgment must lie in denying of him something in particular; so that the meaning of the ‘infinite’ judgment (as it is called) ‘Man is not a fly’ lies in the negative judgement ‘Man is-not a fly’, and it is clear that we have not resolved the negative into the affirmative form, when such affirmative can only be understood by restoration to the negative. But it is out of such attempts that so-called purely negative terms like ‘not-fly’ have arisen; and it is only by understanding that the term A has been the predicate of a negative judgment, that we can understand how the term not-A should ever have been formed.

"There are however certain negative terms which are not such mere figments of logic as the ‘infinite terms’ considered above. Where the positive is not a general concrete term but is attributive, there the corresponding negative may be quite legitimate; indeed the distinctions of positive, negative, and privative most properly apply not to all, but only to attributive terms, or to abstract terms founded upon these. For all attributive terms imply a subject of which they may be predicated, and to which they refer that attribute which constitutes their meaning. Therefore even if the term be negative, it still suggests a subject which, lacking the attribute which the negative term excludes, is conceived as having some character instead. And here we have a basis of positive meaning to the negative term; for let A be a positive term; then not-A will signify what a subject, which might be A, will be if it is not A. Thus intemperate signifies what a man, who might be temperate, will be if he is not that; uneven suggests what a line or surface, such as the surface of a road, will be if it is not even; not-blue suggests what a thing which might be blue (that is, an object having some colour) will be if it has not that colour. The definiteness of the positive meaning which a negative term thus conveys will vary greatly, according to the range of alternative attributes which we conceive possible to a subject that might conceivably have possessed the attribute denied of it; thus intemperate has a more definite meaning than not-blue, because when temperance is excluded, though there are many degrees of intemperance, yet they have more affinity with one another as opposed to temperance than have the remaining colours as opposed to blue; unruffled has a more definite meaning still, for a surface which is not in any way ruffled can only be smooth.

"It has been alleged that ‘not-blue’ does not necessarily imply ‘coloured in some other way than blue’, nor ‘not-even’ a surface of another kind than even; that it is as true to say of banter that it is not blue as of a buttercup, and that larceny is as much not-even as Lombard Street. But such a contention misinterprets our thought. Just as privative terms imply the absence of an attribute from a subject that possessed or should have possessed it, and therefore must convey a notion of what the subject consequently is without that attribute, so negative terms (at any rate when they are not mere figments of logic) imply the absence of an attribute from a subject that might conceivably have possessed it, and therefore convey a notion of what the subject is instead. The attribute which a negative term excludes belongs to a genus of attributes (as blue belongs to the genus colour, or prudence to the genus feature of human character, or square to the genus figure); and if a subject is unsusceptible of any attribute within that genus, we should not be a pains to deny of it some particular attribute therein; since the soul for example has no figure, we should not say that it is not-square; since furniture has no feature of human character, we should not call a towel-horse imprudent. The negative term is only used of what must have some attribute within its genus; and this genus furnishes a substratum of positive meaning to the negative term; not-blue does mean ‘coloured not with blue’ and not-even ‘having a surface which is uneven’.

"Many negative terms indeed are not themselves attributives, but are abstracts which presuppose an attributive; and what has been said of negative attributives is confirmed by the fact that these abstracts - such as injustice, inequality, non-intervention - are very positive in their meaning. ‘Injustice’ does not mean whatever is not justice (such as ‘accidence and adjectives and names of Jewish kings’), but the quality of being unjust; ‘inequality’ means the relation of being unequal; non-intervention the conduct of the non-intervening. Abstract negative terms like not-equality or not-colour are as unreal as concrete negative terms like not-Socrates or not-book.

"It may be asked, if all negative terms (and the same is true of privative) have a positive meaning, what is the use of the distinction between them? The answer is as follows. First, with regard to the distinction of positive and privative terms; there are some states which can only be understood as the privation of a positive state: deafness would have no meaning, but for our knowing what it is to hear; we cannot think of a body dessicated, except we think of it as having first contained moisture.

"Secondly, with regard to the distinction between positive and negative terms: there is a real difference between a term which signifies one definite attribute, and a term which signifies any attribute within a genus except one; the latter is in most cases comparatively indeterminate and uninstructive; e.g. vertebrate signifies a definite anatomical structure; invertebrate signifies an animal structure which is not vertebrate, but fails to characterize it further. Positive terms are positive directly and precisely, negative terms indirectly and for the most part vaguely. This distinction is important, and we are therefore justified in calling attention to it; it will be seen for example presently to be one of the rules of definition to state what a thing is, not what it is not; this is best expressed by the injunction to avoid, as far as possible, negative terms; and there is no way in which the point of this instruction could be so well conveyed as by the help of the distinction of negative and positive terms."

April 28, 2006

Knowledge, purpose and pleasure

Filed under: Personal, Speculation

Why does knowledge bring pleasure? Why is it thoroughly possible and right to revel in a statement of fact? If something is, it just is (once you know it). What is exciting about that? Why, when it comes down to it, is the understanding of "A is A" so fantastically marvelous?

Certainty. The Law of Identity brings certainty. When you know what something is for sure, you can count on it as a touchstone and base for knowledge, and this makes possible a whole proceeding network of possibilities available for construction as desired. And what is desireful construction but hope incarnate? Reason to be joyful, indeed.

Purpose as organizer: Purpose structures, sifts, sorts experience according to a standard, making it, at once, more readily intelligible and more immediately useful, being practically pre-applied to a goal. Thus knowledge newly acquired becomes automatic progress, of a sort, towards one’s eagerly anticipated goals. A nucleating grain of purpose in a super-cool information pool, precipitates order about itself, making tangible and cognitively graspable the former - and unbearable - incorporeality.

Notes on Logic, Chapter 2

Filed under: Quotes, Logic

Chapter 2: Of Terms and Their Principal Distinctions

pg 14: "The true unit of thought, the simplest complete act of thought, or piece of thinking, is the Judgement or Proposition: between which where a distinction is intended, it is that the proposition is the expression in words of judgement."

pg 15: "In judging then I always distinguish a particular element, the predicate, in the being of a subject which I could not think of unless I recognized in it some other than the predicated character." see footnote. "I must think, severally yet together, of both; and if I want to call attention to them separately, I must indicate then by different signs; but in order to make the judgement, though I need a sign, I do not need to indicate them by different signs."

- Aha. Fantastic. The black billiard ball peels back a layer. What is inside? A superficial conflagration, spurring a hasty secular mysticism, that but seconds later reveals itself to be a simple identification of the process of cognition. A calling to attention, with language, parcels of integrated thought. To discover how we think, we must divide up thought with language, like a surgeon with a scalpel, though thought only exists and functions as an inseparable whole. This is no more circular than the surgeon repairing by cutting, the discovery of internal nature by investigation of that external to us. It’s all dependent upon the soundness of Induction. From this vantage point, I cannot see how any knowledge is, at root, possible without Induction. The obvious, as usual, with me. It seems the most straightforward and liberating and exhilerating of activities. Why the mess of the 20th century?

pgs 17-18: Subject and predicate, but not the act of predication, are the terms in a judgement… A proposition is a sentence, but not merely a sentence: it is a sentence expressing or menaing and judgement. Otherwise, we could not speak of resolving it into its terms; for the subject and predicate words, at which we thus arrive, need not have been in the unresolved proposition; and a mere sentence could not be resolved into words that were not in it… "It is easy then to see that a term is not the same as a word. in a judgement there are always two terms, but a single word may express both; … also, many words may make one term; this is the commonest case. … Some words cannot normally be the terms of a proposition at all. They do not indicate by themselves any object of thought, but are either used, like:"

  • an article, in cojunction with some descriptive word, to designate an object
  • an adverb, to qualify what another or word expresses
  • a preposition or conjunction - to makr some reltaion between different parts of a complex object of thought, or to express an operation of thought. 

    - Syncategorematic: the above types of words - they can only be used with others in predication
    - Categorematic: words that can be used alone as subject or predicate.
              She left lonely for ever the kings of the sea.
              Italicized = syncategorematic
    - Mixed terms: contain categorematic and syncategorematic words.
    - Suppositio materialis: words with no referent used grammatically in a sentence as a subjects. "Of is a preposition."

pg 20: The answer to, "What is it called?" may be:
      1. Proper names
      2a. General names (man, river), and
      2b. Kinds, attributes and relations. Descriptions used as subjects are not names.

pg 21: It is sometimes necessary to indicate whether by the terms of a proposition we mean what is thought of [regardless of what combination of words are used to designate or describe it], or the words signifying that. Call the former terms of thought, latter, the terms verbal.

-         Again distinguishing between the entire thought represented by a sentence, and the nuts and bolts of the sentence itself. Nuts and bolts are terms verbal.
-         Term of thought: whatever can be thought of as the subject or predicate of a proposition.
-         Term verbal: a word or combination of words capable of standing as the subject or predicate of a proposition.

pg 22: Terms as words versus terms as what they stand for:

-         concept: always the latter; never just the words or names, but the entire thought represented by them.
-         Concept: that which is conceived
-         Conception: the act of conceiving

A concept is not the same as a term of thought, because concrete individuals may be terms of thought, but they are not concepts, for we may perceive or think of, but not conceive them. Nevertheless, many terms of thought are concepts. – The problem of universals – the one and the many.

1. “Barkis is willin’.” The predicate is one of several possible to the subject. The subject is inidicated only by a name, which doesn’t at its face tell you the identity of the other predicates.

2. “The emperor is captured.” Predicate is also one of many possible to the subject; the subject is a general name, which entails some other predicates at face value.

1 and 2: Both have predicate subject, and subject is a concrete individual. But, in 2, the subject term (a concrete) is a subject-concept (which is but a detail in the being of the concrete subject, the person who is the emperor.)

3. “A bacillus is a vegetable.” Subject is a subject-concept and predicate is a predicate-concept. Both are not merely a detail of their respective concrete, but instead its essential or constitutive being. The predicate is the general being of the subject. The subject is the essential detail of the subject-concept. Being a bacillis is being a vegetable.

4. “To obey is better than sacrifice.” The subject is not a concrete thing, but a concept. The predicate also, but it’s not the general being of the subject-concept, and does not mean than obeying is superiority (noun) to sacrifice.

5. “To doubt is to think.” The subject is a subject-concept. The predicate is a predicate-concept and is the general being of the subject. The proposition does mean that doubting is thinking. (Complete conceptual containment of S in P, though P is not entirely contained within S).

Key points:
i.                    Concepts are characters (not necessarily sensible – i.e. sense-able, with sensation) which we find displayed in individuals.
ii.                   These characters may be characters which, as it were, cover the whole being of these individuals, or only details in their being.
iii.                 One character may cover the whole being, or be the general being, of another
iv.                Where the predicate-character covers the whole being of the subject, or subject-character, the latter is the former essentially, and not only may the things be denominated from the subject character be denominated from the predicate character, but the subject-character itself is the predicate-character.
v.                  Where the predicate character is only a detail in the being of the subject (whether subject-individual or subject-character) the subject is not thus essentially the former (i.e. P is a detail, a part): the predicate character is incidental to the subject, or co-incidental with the subject-character in the same individual subject. The S or S-character is not its P, in this case, i.e. not essential or wholly containing.

Pg 24. “Thus judgment involves concepts among its terms of thought, but individuals may be terms of thought also (one and many may be terms); but these terms of thought (individual or concept) are not in every judgment judged to be related in the same way, though the forms of language do not always bring out these differences in the relation between subject and predicate.

-         Insufficiency of language mechanics (grammar) to capture all meanings always. 
-         * go over again

Pg 24: On the problem of universals: “But it would be wrong because [concepts] are not sensible, to suppose that they are not real independently of the conceiving mind: that they are products of the activity of conceiving.” See ftnt 4 “… I am concerned here to urge that what is apprehended in things by thinking, but is not sensible, is not less really in them nor more dependent on the mind [for existing as a trait] than what is apprehended [directly and wholly] by sense-perception.”

-         a word-use distinction made by both me and HWBJ: “existing” is confined to sense-able things, and non-sense-ables are said to be.

Pg 27. “The universal is not one of its own instances, and cannot be found like them. Nevertheless to deny that there are universals is to deny all identity between different individuals, and to do this is to say that we can never, by what we learn of the connection of characters in one individual, infer one from the presence of another in a second individual.”

-         So the problem of induction is a variant, or out-growth, of the problem of universals, yes?

Pg 28 ftnt 1: “Yet biologists do not seem always to have asked themselves which they mean when they write about evolution. Do individual men evolve, or is it the human nature which is displayed in them all? And if the latter, and men are descended from animals whose nature was not human nature, but has evolved into human nature, what is the relation of the two, or are human nature and pithecanthropous nature the same common nature? And if so, are there many species or only one?”

-         The man has nailed the species problem. To a T. Fantastic. This is what I want to work on.

Pg 28. “The ordinary classifications of terms are classifications of them as words which signify objects of thought; but the distinctions are based on differences in what we think of, or what in general we think things to be.”

Pg 29: “Our  notion of a thing … iinvolves two elements, which furnish the basis for a further division of both concrete and abstract terms into those which are singular and those which are common or general. A thing is, first, an individual, having an existence distinct from that of other individuals; the page, for example, on which these lines are printed is a different page from every other in this book. But secondly, a thing has a character, which may be the same in other things; just as other pages in this book, though individually different, are equally pages. This character, which belongs alike to many individuals, is sometimes called, as we saw, an universal; and they, as so many different cases or examples of it, are called particulars: particulars, as we often say also, of a kind.”

Pg 29: “A general term is thus one that is predicable of any number of individuals in the same sense: a singular term one that is predicable of one individual only in the same sense: and a singular term is a proper name if it does not indicate what individual it stands for by reference to any special element in its being.”

-         did Linnaeus perpetuate thinking problems by the scheme he devised for naming? A name often comes to suggest more than it means. What did Linnaeus mean by the names? What do they mean now? What does the evidence suggest now?

Pg 30. Proper names as non-descriptive, non-essential, and pragmatically coined. [Pragmatic decisions may be objectively given when in relation to the full nature and context – including cognitive – of a situation. Pragmatic decisions may be a subset of objective decisions; but not all. If a pragmatic decision is dissociated from an objective methodology, regardless of the concurrence of outcomes, the decision is not objective, but arbitrary. Hence Pragmatism.]

Pg 32. “Now, it has not been stated in the last sentence, what general terms are the names of. Are they also the names of individuals, or are they names of the character common to many individuals? The former view seems incomplete, for it does not take account of their difference from singular terms. The latter view is plainly wrong, for man is clearly predicated from individual men, not of the nature common to them; and when I say that  man is mortal, I mean that men die, not that human nature dies; that is displayed in a succession of individuals who are born and perish, but is not born and does not perish itself. We must then accept the former view. General concrete names are names of individuals, but names of them in respect of their common nature. Hence they imply the existence of universals, though they are not the names of these.”

-         YES. The problem of using general names and individuals. Huge. Classes in general. How did Ghiselin formulate the concept of class-individuals in the 1970s?

Pg 33: “…[T]he substantial nature of a thing cannot properly be regarded as a mere attribute of it.”

Pg 33: “But men are interested chiefly in the individual instances of what is concrete, and in the general nature of their attributes or relations; and so not only are there no proper names for these, but the general name, besides being used of them, is used also of their general nature, or universal. Death, when I speak of Caesar’s death or Alexander’s, is a general abstract term, comparable with the general concrete term man; when I say that death comes in many forms, it is the name of an universal, comparable not with man but with humanity. So colour is a general abstract term, if I speak of the colours of yesterday’s sunset, but the name of an universal – viz. colouredness – when I say that colour has divers species. The fact that many words are used both as general abstract terms and as names of the universals of attributes or relations helps to make us regard the names of universals of substances as abstract. ‘Colour’, as predicable not of a coloured thing but of its attribute, is an abstract term; meaning colourdness it is a word of the same sort as ‘goldness’; hence we think ‘goldness’ an abstract term also.

Pg 36: “Abstract terms then are the names of attributes or relations; but we must understand this definition rather widely. It is not only sensible qualities, like favours or odours, whose names are abstract terms; each element in the being of the individual concrete thing.. is abstract, and its name (where it has any) an abstract term. Moreover, the thing in question need not be a single thing (or person)…; it may be an assemblage of what we regard as distinct things (or persons)…; but if there are features belonging to this assemblage, though they are not qualities of any one thing in it… these features considered in themselves are abstract, and their names … abstract also. Hence discipline, civilization, paternity, are all abstract terms… And we have seen that commonly, though confusedly, terms like ‘animality’ and ‘triangularity’ are also called abstract, names, that is, not of the distinguishable individual elements in the being of the individual concrete thing, but of the universals whereof either individual concrete things, or the various distinguishable individual elements in their being, are instances.”

-         This is how we get hierarchy theory biologically. Pay close attention.

Pg 36: Terms verbal. 1. Abstract. 2. Concrete. 3. Attributive terms (adjectives and adjectival terms; red, beaten, insolvent).

Alfredo Gomez

Filed under: Pics
Alfred Gomez, Rustic Table, 2005
"Rustic Table." 2005
"Afternoon Delight." 2005

The problems of biology

Filed under: Philosophy, Goals, Speculation, Evolution

The philosophical problems particular to biologists center around change and, therefore, identity. What is the identity of something that morphs into something else, such that the ends of a time series would never be classed as the same, or even similar by some useful standard?

Furthermore, thanks to reproduction (and colonialism, specialisation, and integration), identification of individuals can be extremely problematic. Complete dependence as well as internalization and genetic difference characterizes both parasites and fetuses, yet we hardly mistake the two.

Definitions and designations seem to implicitly assume a certain, unsaid timeslice, or timelessness. But it is the very nature of biological systems to both - inextricably - persist and change, such that time becomes an explicitly confounding factor. What then of identity? Are definitions purely arbitrary? Purely defined with humans as their point of reference, in terms of time, size, individuality, and use? How do the conventional rules of identification, conceptualization, and definition apply to such problematic systems? Do we need new rules? Or just a new way of looking and thinking?

Ah, this is so exciting, because it has tremendous downstream consequences for that other biological system: humans. But… particularly. Specifically. Carefully. Eyes wide open. For there’s always more.

April 27, 2006

Mr and Mrs … ?

Filed under: Reading and Books, Quotes

Thanks to Tasos for pointing this out: Your daily dose of "What the hell?!" http://www.timeout.com/film/news/1102.html

I’m not wholly opposed. As I’ve concluded every conversation on the topic: Even with perfect casting, producing, and directing, it’ll sink if the entire crew doesn’t get what it’s about and portray it as such.

It’s a tall, tall order.

April 26, 2006

Notes on Logic, Chapter 1

Filed under: Reading and Books, Logic

Foreword: I’ll be transcribing here the quotes and notes I wish to retain from my reading of HWB Joseph’s An Introduction to Logic, (1916). This is not meant to be a summary of the chapters, but the references and jumping off points for future thoughts and research. My quotations should be accurate, but in many places I will paraphrase, and will not use quotations then.

—

Chapter 1: Of the general character of the enquiry

pg 2: "[I]n the same ways that we study the laws of motion as they are exemplified in the movement of all bodies, without studying all the bodies that ever move, so we may study the laws of thought, as they are exemplified in thinking about all subjects, without studying all the subjects that are ever thought of."

pg 3: "[B]ut it is not the business of Logic to make men rational, but rather to teach them in what their being rational consists." [Lovely]. "And this they could never learn, if they were not rational first."

pg 3: "Logic, then, is the science which studies the general principles in accordance with which we think about things, whatever things they may be." … Our thought about things is expressed partly "and most systematically in the various sciences. Those sciences are the best examples of human thinking about things, the  most careful, clear and coherent, that exist. In them, therefore, the logician can best study the laws of men’s thinking, and it is in this sense that we may accept the old definition of Logic, scientia scientiarum."

pg 4: "… what is meant by saying that Logic is concerned with forms of thinking. … By form we mean what is the same in many individuals called materially different. … And all science is formal, in the sense that it deals with waht is common to differences." YES.

pg 5 footnote: "What is different in particular thoughts is not related to their common form as … to their common[ality], but rather as the specialty of their structures to the generic identity, or as particular instances to the common nature of which they are instances."
- All of page 5 is good - He reminds us not to abstract logic too far, to the commonest of all common denominators. You miss a lot when you do this, and bastardize the point of the whole thing anyway.

cont’d: "But the truth is, that we think in different ways about subjects of different kinds, and therefore we must, if we wish to study the principles that pervade our thinking, consider to some extent the differences in our thinking arising from differences in that about which we think."
- This is a key to arguing against reductionism - the bane of biologists who rail against it yet participate in it themselves. Natures are different, though materials may be connected…

pg 5 cont’d: "The distinction between form and matter may as it were be taken at different levels." Discussion of Cuvier’s embranchements. "The higher the level therefore at which in Zoology the distinction between form and matter is taken, the less can we study the form in isolation from variety of matter; no example taken from one order of animals, say the starfish, will enable us to realize what animality is."
- So the same for logic - we need wide material familiarity (with thoughts) for wide concepts.

pg 7: "Form cannot be studied apart from matter." "What is important to realize is the need for following the common form out into the differences which it displays in different matter."

pg 7 ftnt: "In strictness, the generic nature of a subject should not be called an attribute of it."

pg 10: "Logic ascertains the methods and nature of knowledge, but does not prescribe it.
- This is a total inversion of what I had assumed, and - perhaps? - been taught. It totally changes the ethics of epistemology - who prescribes what, and why. Existence and experience are primary. It is only from these that we can figure out how we exist, but existing is the given. Same for experience. It need not be proved, as some might imply or attempt to do; only explored, explained, explicated.

pg 12: "[It is] just because it studies our thought about things, [that it] is concerned with questions about the general nature of things."
- Logic’s role, relation to metaphysics.

pg 11 (The value and purpose of Logic): "It would be a mistake to suppose that it can have no practical value unless it can furnish rules for ‘the conduct of the understanding.’ The direct help that it can give in this way is not very great. Its practical value in general education is firstly this: that it demands very careful and exact thinking about its own subject matter, and thus tends to produce a habit of similar carefulness in the study of any other subject. In this it only does for the mind what a thorough training in any exact science might do. Secondly, it makes us realize better what the general forms of speech that we habitually use really mean, and familiarizes us with the task of examining our reasonings and looking to see whether they are conclusive. In this it has an effect which the study of some special science like botany is not equally calculated to produce. Thirdly, it brings more clearly into consciousness… what knowledge is, and so far furnishes us with a sort of standard by which to judge what we commonly call our knowledge of things; it makes us more alive to shortcomings in our ordinary opinions. But it does not need for its justification that we should point to effects which it produces upon our thoughts about other subjects; the nature of thought and knowledge is itself a subject worthy of investigation. And, if we are to look also beyond this, its chief value lies in its bearing upon these ultimate problems, concerning the nature of reality, and man’s place and destiny in the world, from which at first sight it might seem far remote." Fantastic.
- I particularly appreciate his attention to the consequences of the study of Logic, but insistance that the primary justification of a subject or study be the very nature of that study itself. Use does not justify means. Means must justify themselves. The entire enterprise may be motivated by the uses, but it cannot move ethically beyond its means.

pg 12: "Thus recent Symbolic Logic is full of discussions about classes and the relations between classes, because it holds thinking to be fundamentally thinking about the relations of classes. It seems to me that classing and class-relations are a very secondary subject of though, and that for this reason Symbolic Logic gives a very distorted theory of thinking."
- Something to re-visit upon reading Ghiselin’s formulation of species as individuals rather than as (only) classes.

pg 13 ftnt: An exploration of the relation between thinking (downstream: epistemology) and being (downstream: metaphysics) - wholly beautiful. Discusses the Law of Identity, the Law of Contradiction, and the Law of Excluded Middle, and some aspects of determinism, and the ability of the mind to know reality, and of thought to capture reality. Joseph dismisses any doubt or concern on those matters. We are fully capable.

April 25, 2006

The nature of logic

Filed under: Reading and Books, Philosophy, Logic

From HWB Joseph’s Introduction to Logic, 1916.

"It is not the business of Logic to make men rational, but rather to teach them in what their being rational consists. And this they could never learn, if they were not rational first." (pg 2)

"Logic, then, is the science which studies the general principles in accordance with which we think about things, whatever things they may be. … [O]ur thought [about things] is expressed partly … and most systematically in the various sciences. Those sciences are the best examples of human thinking about things, the most careful, clear and coherent, that exist. In them, therefore, the logician can best study the laws of men’s thinking, and it is in this sense that we may accept the old definition of Logic, scientia scientiarum." [The science of science, I think] (pg 3).

April 24, 2006

My book

Filed under: Philosophy, Goals, Dreams, Evolution

I’ve known this goal, in some format, for at least four years. I want to write a book - one in particular, though I may end up writing several. The comprehensive version will be on grounding, objectively, the biological sciences, stating explicitly the connections to and through epistemology and metaphysics, and identifying, evaluating, justifying and/or reforming the biological methods, both shared with other sciences and unique. I’ll also have a section on intellectual ethics (i.e. ethics in the pursuit of knowledge) and bioethics (i.e. ethics in the application of biological knowledge). I want to evaluate and integrate the concept of deep time and the fossil record - a concept shared perhaps only with cosmology and geology. I want it to be the comprehensive guide to being a biologist, the one stop shopping approach to philosophy for people who want to get on with doing their science. This book may be a compilation of journal articles submitted individually. I would (currently) dedicate the collective work "To my three great teachers: Aristotle, Ayn Rand, and Stephen Jay Gould." Political sensibilities be damned.

I also want to do a follow-up college-level book: "The foundations of biology: An introductory text." I want this to be a text accessible to upper-level undergrads and be the sort of book consulted by professors or assigned to such students. It should contain material comprehensive enough to use as a supplement to theoretically-inclined biology courses. The summaries presented in this book should provide a sufficiently short and comprehensible basis for context-setting lectures at the beginning of a semester, or in similar short units in advanced high school classes. There should be no reason, except for ineptitude or carelessness, that a biology major should not be able to explicate how he knows that the information in biology is to be trusted.

That is my goal. The entailments are significant, but they are perceptually reduced by comparison to the greater worthiness of this goal.

Sidenote: I first conceived of this project sometime in 2002, but I envisioned it as an autobiography that would enable people to do much more than simply learn about me. I planned to call it: "This view of life: The autopsychography of a burgeoning mind." It was to present my philosophy of everything.

April 23, 2006

On thinking, being and relating

Filed under: Philosophy, Speculation

Some scattered thoughts:

Identification = Knowledge

Identification + Evaluation = Understanding

Identification + Evaluation + Action = Integrity

Identification + Evaluation + Integration = Wisdom

On relations:

On first glance, it seems to me that everything must have a relation with everything else. And here I mean relation in the most neutral sense - not implying that a relation is of a particular kind, just that it has a kind, that is, it has an identity. Here also, I’ll try to use the term ‘relation’ when I mean this sort of unspecified sharing of something. The term ‘relationship’ is only applicable when the type of relation has already been identified.

It seems obvious to me that (for example) I have a relation with the rocks, gravel and dirt that I pass over, pass by, or simply exist with - either daily or only once ever, whether I’m aware of it or not. They simply are, and I am (though not simply); therefore we must have a relation, if only as sharers of a common totality.

But is that true? And if so, are all such relations the same? What are the key attributes parsing this catch-all term ‘relation." And do different sorts have different implications? Is my relation with the rock under my foot on the driveway the same as my relation with rocks in Timbuktu (and I have never been to Timbuktu), or with rocks from the Permian that have since been subducted into nothingness under the plates of the ocean? And do two rocks, at different places in space and time, and with or without discernible interactions, have any relation apart from my consideration of it?

Here, I’ll use the tools identity, perception, function and context to hopefully untangle all this, with a view towards some rather discrete applications (i.e. solutions to little problems running around my head).

First, there are two kinds of contexts: some delimited kind, in which you need to specify that which it contains (a positive description) and its extension in space and time; and all contexts, or, the whole of existence, which must also be positively described* (as I have done). Definitions may be better or worse, and may be revised over time as needed (but no more often).

Let’s start with the easy kind. In the context of me, here in Berkeley, and the reasonable and likely character of the next few months, what is my relation to the rock crunching under my foot on the sidewalk? There’s a functional relationship between the rock, which is being ground into the ground by my foot, and the feeling of it on my foot through my shoe, and the sound of it, and, resulting from all this, the thought, "Dang, I need new shoes." What’s the nature of this functional relationship? There are two parts - the functional one, as I described, of physics and physiology, which can be quite adequately described at most levels by the special sciences and the law of cause and effect.

But there’s a second relationship - one with existence. The functional relationship is only possible because the rock and I both exist at the same slices of time and space. We exist together. The same can be said for all the rocks I did not, have not, and will not interact with. We are related only insofar as we both exist.

Why not collapse the terms then, and allow for the category of "no relation"? Why not define all relations as functional ones, and ones without functions as non-relations? Everything need not be related, just as every individual need not be an astronaut; people can be logically (though not terribly usefully) divided into astronauts and non-astronauts. No problem.

Of primary concern here is the observation of indirect function, or of distal causation. The rock I picked up off a park bench was put there by a kid who collected it at the beach; it was washed up on the beach by the action of waves; and it eroded out of a nearby formation from the upper Jurassic. Through the existence and placement of the rock, am I related to the kid, the ocean, and the Jurassic rock formation, even though I have not functionally interacted with them? Or does the relation start and end with the rock? The indirect effect on me of the kid, the ocean, and the rock formation through the rock I am holding, necessitates that I have an existential relation with them. To say that I have no relation with the kid, the ocean or the formation, would be to say that I am affected by something to which I have no relation at all. This seems absurd, so the definition of ‘relation’ must then include the possibility of effect of one thing on another, be it indirect or direct. 

I thus have no relation with things I cannot experience or be affected by given all contexts; and I can only experience that which is, or something which is in reference to that which is. I cannot experience nothingness directly; it’s only in comparison with something that I can conceive of nothing. Therefore the ’something’ is prior and of priority. So, I can only have no relation with things that don’t exist. Everything which exists, I have (at minimum) an existential relationship with. I can only conceive of things which don’t exist by reference to things that do. Existing is prior to not existing (epistemologically).

So, to sum up: The absence of relation is only possible between me and that which does not exist. All relations are, at minimum, with things that exist, and can be termed existential relations, or just the general term ‘relation.’ A sub-set of existential relations are functional relations, and require direct interaction between the two entities. Some existential relations are indirectly functional, though because of the infinite regress in causality, this term may simply grade into the prior term, existential relation. Thus, ‘indirect functional relation’ may be a useful descriptive term (in tracing chains of cause and effect), but it doesn’t logically differ from ‘existential relation.’

The pinch is, I’ll never primarily experience having no relation with something, because when I consider the concept "nothingness", I’m comparing it with an existing relation, and subtracting from that (if you can do that at all). I’ll only know that I had a non-relation after the fact, and non-experientially, after I’ve established a relation with something that does exist, and compared it to what came before it. You can only identify a non-relation by reflection, never by experience. (In concept formation, I give priority to epistemological development (which occurs in terms of positives) as opposed to chronological or metaphysical development, which may include epistemological negatives. Concepts are human constructions made, first and foremost, to reflect what we experience; defining something in terms of that which cannot be experienced flouts how our particular, human epistemology works. That kind is the only kind with which I am concerned, because it is the only context in which we will ever operate.) Identifying a non-relation by reflection differs from having an as-yet-unidentified relation with something that exists, but you’re simply not aware of it yet (or ever). A metaphysical versus cognitive distinction. We can thus say with certainty that no one will ever know all the relations in which he is involved, because no one can know all that there is to know. (This isn’t a new conclusion, obviously, and doesn’t change our lives one iota.) Thus, relations as defined need not be cognitive.

So, returning to the rocks, do any two given rocks have a relation, outside my consideration of them? Because relations depend on things that exist, and do not depend on cognition: yes, the two rocks identified have an existential relationship. What if one gets pulverized, or melted, or subducted into god-know-whatness in the next great era? It ceases to be the rock, or even part of the rock, that you identified. Yet we know that the materials, down to the subatomic level, are still there. Then we can shift the scope of our context under consideration to include the particular atoms (and such) comprising each rock, and track them through time. Because they don’t disappear, these atoms and their consituent parts have a perpetual existential relation outside of the various fates of the larger scale entities they comprise. (Context expansion is a very productive description of increased knowledge).

Two interacting rocks, say falling down a hillside and occasionally colliding with each other, have a functional relation in addition to an existential relation. They may have direct functional relations and indirect functional relations (through the other rock) with the kids who pushed them both down the hill to begin with.

This instance points out the nature of relations per se. They are not material; they don’t have a exist apart from the things doing the relating. The designation of ‘relation’ is purely cognitive, and only useful in a cognitive context - that is, a human context. (Cognitive robots created by humans would be using human-derived cognitive abilities). While two objects need not be cognitive themselves to be related existentially, they do need a cognitive observer to identify their relation as such. (Strict and logical adherence to the rules of concept formation (based on the particular nature of the human mind) and to the nature of the objects under consideration avoids the slippery slope of subjectivity.)

So, relations are the conceptualizations of properties of existents - properties like existing in the same totality, and interacting in specific ways when coming into contact or influencing each other. These are not erudite or exciting properties, but the most obvious and boring kind, great for philosophers. The nature of relations is actually quite simple: they are existential and sometimes directly functional, for all things that exist. Indirect functional relations are a useful designation for some existential relations. The identification of relations, however, requires cognition, meaning that not all relations might be identified, though this does not change the nature of the relations, which is determined by the objects themselves.

Now, what of the particular problems and discrete applications? I need to ruminate some more. Mostly I need a break.  

* I have no patience for definitions such as "The complete absence of nothingness," which is inefficient, contradictory and redundant, even if the gist is comprehensible. Even I, the consumate beginner, have more careful and efficient logical skills than that. Gists are not definitions, but a place to start.

Accepting gists or strict intuition or revelation as an acceptable (i.e. an unelaborated, finished-product) means for knowledge - or, worse yet: real, true, or the way of obtaining knowledge - wholly disallows objective identification or evaluation (i.e. understanding) of the components and processes underlying that means to knowledge. That means, you can’t know how you know, you just know (which is different from simply not knowing how you know, which is just an information gap). It’s ineffable, always and forever. Well, how do you know that? You just know. (This is the signal that you’re full of crap, and everything up to this point ought to be flushed). Because this line of reasoning does not differ from an assertional debate (i.e. the five year-olds’ "Ya-huh!" "Nu-uh!" argument), it is a wholly unsatisfactory explanation.

If one allows such explanations, even in a single instance, to be sufficent, then we have cut off, at the roots, the entire enterprise of logic and reason, because now anybody can assert, as truth, anything they please - a situation diametrically opposed to building knowledge. (Containment is illusory. You can never actually restrict the rules of thinking to the domain of a single subject. That is what hypocrites do so well.) In practice, purists of the Ineffable Theory of Knowledge sit there waiting to eff this ineffable stuff, and in the meantime - forever - rely on the knowledge and activities of other people using better methods.

All this is an elaboration of the obvious. As I said, I have no patience for these kinds of people.

Philography and psychohistoriography

Filed under: Reading and Books, Philosophy, Speculation

I wish someone would write a (competent) book called, "A psychological history of cultural and philosophical development: 10,000 BC to present." It’s ok if it’s multiple volumes.

Father of rocket science

Filed under: Reading and Books, Quotes, Creators

Exhibit Salutes Father of Rocket Science

from Yahoo news

WORCESTER, Mass. - He was a sickly boy, often bedridden with tuberculosis, who passed the time with fantastical stories by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells that made his mind imagine otherworldly exploration.

But for Robert Goddard, who would become the founding father of rocket science decades before men were sent to the moon, traveling to places far from Earth wasn’t just the stuff of fiction.

In "Lift Off: Reaching for the Stars," an exhibit on display at the Worcester Historical Museum through July 22, Goddard’s influence on space travel is traced with photos and a narrative timeline from his boyhood dreams in Worcester to the science he developed to make them happen.

In 1899, Goddard became convinced it was possible to blast a rocket into space, and began pursuing physics to prove his theory. He was 17.

"Everyone thought he was nuts," said Vanessa Hofstetter, the museum’s exhibit coordinator. "He thought you could aim a rocket at the moon and it would get there."

Through his research as a student and professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Clark University, Goddard came up with a formula for liquid fuel which he figured would be more powerful than gunpowder that could propel a rocket into space.

The scientific papers he started publishing attracted attention from the media, which quickly dismissed Goddard as a mad scientist without a prayer of proving his theories.

"The thing that really comes to mind when thinking about Robert Goddard is his determination and his focus," said Mott Linn, Clark University’s archivist. "He decided to become a physicist because he wanted to pick the discipline that would help him the most in shooting an object into outer space. It became the No. 1 driving force in his life. How many people have that focus?"

But before his success, there were more than a few stumbles.

Goddard launched his first rocket in 1926 on his aunt’s farm in nearby Auburn.

The 10-foot-long, six-pound projectile of metal tubing shot up 41 feet and arced out 184 feet before crashing in a cabbage patch.

Total flight time: three seconds.

A few more test flights crashed and burned, but the most harrowing of the rocket launches was the fourth one. Back on his aunt’s farm in 1929, the episode created such a violent detonation that it shook nearby homes and frightened residents with balls of fire, plumes of smoke, and a crash that had some thinking an invasion was under way.

But the incident didn’t seem to rattle Goddard.

A photo shows him standing over the decimated projectile with a grin that makes him look downright giddy.

The state fire marshal wasn’t as amused, and banned Goddard from performing any more launches in Massachusetts. The exile led him to start experimenting on federally-owned land at the Fort Devens military base, where the state had no control over his launches.

Funding his research through money he received at Clark, the professor’s work soon attracted the interest and money of industrialist Daniel Guggenheim in the early 1930s.

With a four-year annual grant of $25,000 from Guggenheim, Goddard and his wife moved to Roswell, New Mexico, to continue developing his rocket science.

By 1943, he had been hired by the Navy to work on rocket-assisted takeoff for airplanes near Annapolis, Md.

The exhibit’s focus on Goddard ends with his death, from larynx cancer at age 63, in 1945.

"You’d be overstating it to say he was famous at the time," Linn said. "The United States getting into rocketry was still a decade away."

But his work had an undeniable impact that would become widely recognized.

A few days before the first manned moon landing in 1969, The New York Times ran a correction about a story they published 49 years earlier mocking Goddard’s theories.

Explaining philosophy

Filed under: Philosophy, Rant, Goals, Speculation

To those intimidated by such "intellectual" or "ivory tower" pursuits such as PhDs and philosophy, here’s how I look at it: the view that only the most advanced people, through some kind of accelerated development and "better" view of what’s important, become philosophers and such, is completely backwards in its conclusion, but borne out by the lives of hypocrites and the unideal, and is in many ways correct in component parts. However, that correctness is subtle. Let me elaborate.

I grant that it takes a particular kind of mind to not only put up with philosophy, but to actively seek it out and enjoy it. However, the impression that only geniuses and eccentric wierdos are capable of "doing" philosophy is completely wrong. It just so happens that a lot of philosophers, over time, have been brilliant but eccentric wierdos and probably only a few merit being called (the positive version of) genius* (Aristotle being my favorite). The brilliance required is a certain aptitude with abstractness, because the material basis of philosophy is things like consciousness, existence, knowledge, action, relation, and other such highly derived concepts. Because people aren’t born with concepts, but have to experience and perceive and think a great deal to arrive at them, it’s true that philosophers generally have greater conceptual development and ability than others. However, to the degree that one has both the ability and an interest in philosophy, one may participate and reap the rewards (such as they are). Simple as that. Wierdness has nothing to do with it, at root.

Now, who’s to say that pursuing philosophy is "better" than pursuing less societally and intellectually deified professions? People who say it’s better because it’s so elevated don’t ask how it got there in the first place, and in so doing reveal their own psychological insecurities. Practically speaking, insecure people are less desireable "on the job" than their secure counterparts, because that insecurity may motivate compensatory actions that compromise their job performance. This is no big deal if you’re a janitor or window-washer, for instance, but as you move up the chain of training and responsibility, the number of people capable of evaluating your job performance decreases, and the magnitude of downstream consequences increases greatly (even if the consequences don’t increase legally).**

Now, the million-dollar question is, "Who’s at the top of that chain of responsibility?"

What sorts of things govern the most aspects of human life? Are there common denominators among government, the arts, sciences, industry, recreation, social views and attitudes - and not just now, or in the immediately flanking intervals of time, but over all time, in all places? Not even the actions and decisions of the most powerful rulers of the most powerful countries, over the entirety of civilized time, can account for everything, or even rule or government per se, because that doesn’t tell you how they acquired their particular identities (and the nature of a government makes all the difference in the world).

Rather, the basis for all human action, and the thing governing the identities of human institutions and enterprises, is ideas. And who, over time, has the greatest impact on ideas, and - at the most basic level - governs their identity and deployment? The philosophers.

"Nonsense!" you say. "What an icky bunch. They don’t run my life, I do."

"True," I say. To all of that.

It’s true that philosophy governs ideas. You can trace the role of philosophy, and particular philosphers and their ideas, through history like a detective story - one that, to date, has been more of a horror film than a mystery story, but with some brief and sunny interludes. The horror comes from the absence of good ideas, in whole or at the right times, and from the prevalence of bad ideas, promulgated by various people over time. As stewards of ideas, philosophers are the most responsible, ultimately, for the character of history. Judge as you will.

And it’s also true that you can run your life. The fact that you embrace this truth - your right to freedom - is a combination of your identification and evaluation of this truth, the general perception that this is the case (what I call "drinking from the cultural soup" which is broadly influenced by philosophy; how confidently would you hold this idea - freedom - if you were the only one? Some are stronger than others), and the fact that you feel you can do something about it - that is, because of the place and time in which you live. Context matters. A holocaust prisoner would never think to utter those words, even though every bone in his body tells him that they are true and should have been true.

So, philosophy is important because it governs the identity of ideas. The identity of ideas then governs how they are used. (You’d never think of using a communist ideology in the establishment of a free country; the two ideas are opposites.) Why use ideas? Because they capture a whole lot of information at once; they are efficient, especially when they’re right. (The trouble is, of course, that unless you’re evaluating ideas in their fundamental terms, it can take a lot of trial and error to figure out when you’re playing with fire - which can be controlled and put to work - and when you’re juggling live grenades. This trial and error plays out over centuries, with many generations forgetting or blotting out the lessons of their ancestors.)

And who uses ideas? Everyone, obviously. Indeed, the people with the greatest ambitions are the biggest consumers of ideas. So, anyone who wants to do anything, needs an idea. And unless you have the time, talent and patience to sit down and invent one all your own (which some people do), chances are you’re going to adopt, borrow, or mix-and-match from the ideas already available to you. Like a good consumer of material goods, though, it pays to carefully evaluate each one in terms of quality, durability, function and cost.

What if you don’t find an idea suitable to your purposes? Maybe all the existing ones don’t fit quite right, or are openly contradictory to your aims. Assuming your aims are good and true, you either sit down and make an idea, or you give up on your goals. Depending on what that needed idea is, it may take a few days or weeks of moderate deliberation, or years of concentrated focus. You evaluate this cost and the perceived benefit in terms of your own abilities and the time and resources available to you - and make your decision. If you ratchet up the magnitude of the situation to the nth degree, your decision is this: become a philosopher, or give up.

Thus, the properly motivated philosopher is one with, ultimately, very practical, real-world goals to accomplish, ones that are probably quite comprehensible to people who would never consider "doing" philosophy. He has simply decided to stop building his project and lay a better foundation instead, especially if he knew that the project would eventually collapse upon the current foundation. This groundwork is research. Research generates the knowledge, the ideas, necessary for doing, building, making anything. The researcher may be a professional philosopher, an academic in another discipline, a non-academic industry researcher, or the man working in his garage in his spare time. One need not receive a paycheck or be addressed as a philosopher to be a philosopher.

The benefit of institutionalizing and concentrating a particular pursuit is the perceived increase in efficiency. The man working in his garage with limited resources will, all else equal, make less headway than if you gave him a salaried paycheck, all the necessary information at his fingertips, and an empty schedule. Hence the justification for research departments within corporations, and academia.

So, to sum up, the idea that the pursuit of philosophy is some kind of higher, truer level of knowing, and that philosophers are "better" than the average person, represents an un-said confusion over what constitutes higher, truer, and better. If people mean some ineffable, unworldly, un-practicable, perversion of knowledge of the real world, then the perception that philosophers are the gods of academia is completely wrong. This would be the criteria for being shunned. Instead, I suggest viewing philosophers as talented individuals with very specific worldly purposes - the generation and explanation of ideas that undergird the entire ediface of human knowledge, production and achievement. In this view, philosophers are the businessmen that never made it out of the research department, the producers who put their dreams on hold, in order to make those dreams practically and eventually possible, though often not in their own lifetimes.

That’s not what all philosophers are. But it’s what they should be, and what I may, in some capacity, eventually be.

*It’s key to remind oneself that mental illness is not brilliance, and it doesn’t provide more valid insight than mental wellness. Quite the contrary. Unfortunately, for whatever biological and sociological reasons, many geniuses are not entirely well, and also unfortunately, many people treat brilliant but mentally ill people as somehow inspired, and generations of erroneous thought thus originate from complete bollux. Greater care in discriminating ideas is needed.

**The result is, the people at the top have no superiors, and are regulated by their peers, and the person at the top is solely regulated by his integrity. This conclusion makes many people squirm, and rightly it should. However, our various methods of reducing the discomfort of this situation have been, in my view, all wrong. I do have a solution, though I’ll probably never see it in my lifetime.  

April 21, 2006

More monuments, my monument

Filed under: Philosophy, Personal, Speculation, Evolution

On the way home from my meeting in the city this evening, I walked the few extra blocks and checked out the Mechanics Monument at the corner of Bush and Market. It was about 9:30 at night. It was marvelous, of course, and I want to see it again by daylight. And many other times. But tonight it struck me as funnily … almost incongruent. It gleamed black and complicated in the street light, and the rounded, expressive human forms contrasted sharply against the sheer faces of the skyscrapers on all sides. Looking from below - the bottom figure was above my head - I saw the light on the face of one of the men on the lever arm, mouth contorted with effort but eyes focused and determined, and it was topped by the clear dark sky squeezed between two skyscrapers, a few stars holding steady, and the framing columns of black windows and white concrete stretched ever upwards, it seemed, with the occasional office animating the stark face.

And I thought, the kind of minds making these two kinds of objects are, for all their concrete differences, amazingly alike. The difference was so immense, and the principles so crisply evident and homologous, that the monument and buildings seemed strangely compatible.

"This will create that."

I wonder what all the mechanics and tradesmen who built these buildings - rebuilt the city, in fact, after the 1906 earthquake and fire, which the monument survived unscathed - thought when they saw this sculpture. I wonder what the architect, and the financier, and the CEOs and managers and engineers thought and think, when looking at this sculpture for the first time or the thousanth time. I say to them, "This is you. This is of the best within you, though named after those you may think unlike you. This is the creative enterprise, essentialized and scuplted and cast in bronze. Are you up to it?"

—

The meeting I went to was the monthy meeting on the history and philosophy of science at the Cal Academy of Science. It sounds much more impressive than it is. But I think it has potential. Mostly we eat pizza and the gray-beards nuke someone’s crack at philosophy. I aim to speak at least once each meeting, if only to justify my presence and earn the pizza I eat for free, though always offer to pay for.

Tonight’s topic was quite interesting, by my own preferences: the theoretical and practical problems of the concepts convergence and parallelism in evolution. But the topic was of secondary importance to me (espeically since the details consisted of catfish anatomy). The concept of homology is one of the top three, probably, thorny theoretical issues of evolutionary biology. Some dude read Gould’s big book, like I did, and was blown away by Gould’s parsing of the debate, like I was, and proceeded to discuss the issue further (without reading much else) especially in light of his own work on catfish, which illuminated some additional thorny problems.

So, he didn’t do a great job, but that sparked some of the best discussion I’ve heard yet. Things like, "Well, what do you mean by that? How do you form a definition?" and "He means the Gouldian essence of constraint, but how do you identify it?" and "It all gets back to, how do you establish knowledge, how can you be certain? I say, no knowledge is complete, and you can never be quite certain. That’s why we have probability." And "There’s a difference between the common usage and the technical usage. It’s perfectly alright for practitioners to have a more precise meaning of a term, especially when that precise meaning has been around since 1849." And (one of my favorites), "See, he divides everything into parallelism, and basically non-parallelism - a garbage can category. I learned well in graduate school not to construct such categories." And "Inductivism has been disproven. Can you believe there are still some inductivists out there?" And "By inductivism you mean naive inductivism which says to be objective you have to "let the data speak for itself," which means you basically empty out your brain and stare at the data not realizing that you’re the one who has to interpret it." And "20th century philosophers really screwed up when it came to understanding Hume. They got induction all wrong, and what do we get? Karl Popper. And it started with Bertrand Russell."

And more.

(I’m happy to report that the prof I’m eye-balling as a potential ad hoc philosophy of biology advisor did not utter the worst of the above. The worst was by the pragmatist.)

If ever there was a doubt in my mind that the stuff I’m on about, fired up about, in my philosophy readings, was out to lunch or not applicable or totally fringe - I was wrong. It’s like they were cutting up a cake before me, and someone hands me the center square and it’s got my name on it. There it is, just like that.

Now, what to do about it? As I told Tom today, who’s taking time off history of science because he hasn’t been happy or excited about it in months, if it makes him feel any better, I seem to be moving farther away from Actual Science by the day. The trouble is, I’m in an Actual Science kind of department, and there aren’t any good philosophers of biology at Berkeley. And the patience for philosophy in my department appears to be limited to very particular topics - none of which interest me in the slightest. (One day I’ll happily chuck an entire copy of PhyloCode into the recycle bin, and laugh an evil little laugh of pleasure.)

The naive idealist would say, just up and leave! Find a new home! Or, screw ‘em all, just do it anyway, fight the system all the way! But……. that’s not the most efficient or necessary way, I think. I’m one who bides my time, lays the groundwork, then makes a grand leap and lands perfectly, and stumbles after the judges have turned their backs, regresses for at least a year, catches up, and finishes somewhere near the front of the pack. I’m in no position to leap, at the moment. It’s much too early. And I have extreme difficulty giving up on being a practicing scientist. I want my PhD to be on tangible things, I want to have to grind through all the technical, methodological, maddeningly retarded aspects of just getting data and figuring out how to analyze them, and learning how to identify and evaluate the relevant context, and what my data mean for the meaning and future of that context. It’s all well and good to think about science, but it’s a whole nother ball of worms to actually do it. And that I need to know first hand. I don’t want to be an armchair philosopher, a hack who’s all words and who has clean hands. I’ve never done anything that’s big, and completely new, and completely mine, and essentially all by myself. This is my first monument - a monument to myself, printed on archival paper and filed in the library where no one will ever read it again.

And then… will that piece of cake still be waiting for me? I think so. Will I want it? Probably. Will I be qualified to take it? Maybe eventually. How much will I do about it? I don’t know. Will I have the courage - and she’s right, you know, being a philosopher in any walk of life is the most dangerous profession of all - to take up my principles, and put them into print, and defend them, ad nauseum, for the rest of my life, while enduring all manner of blows and insults because I won’t compromise on the things you can’t compromise on, because I don’t kowtow to tradition or authority, because I’m not a spineless apologizing relativist, and because I don’t seek to be nice or well-liked or well-thought of?

None of these things will make you popular in academia - and academia is a social and subjective enterprise. It’s your peers who control the content and direction of the journals; getting published is a huge part of getting hired; the people the hire you are among the same that review and edit your papers. If your research - and especially your philosophy - or your personality are incompatible with the department - not with objective reality - you don’t get the job. Simple as that. It’s not a "take one for the team, maybe she’s onto something here," approach. It’s social, it’s pragmatic, it’s publication and peer driven. If you’re unpopular, for whatever reason, no matter how well your science squares with reality, you’re in for a rough ride, which includes all forms of rejection plus less money (research and salary), a no-name school, poorer quality students, a heavier teaching load, and less time for your research. Give or take. Some of these matter more than others, obviously. But… idealism does not reign in science. It’s pragmatism. Short-range pragmatism, usually. Long-range means thinking outside of a decade.

Is it worth it? Check back in five years. I’ll have a clearer answer then, for I will have already made and acted on my decision.

Just five years, and the whole the rest of my life (intellectually - which is not actually divisible from the rest of me) will have been set in motion, in one direction or another, though the nature of the goal is the same for both.






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