cheese it, the cops!

well! the nyt definitely seems to be in a philosophy phase.

Dreyfus and Kelly start with Vico’s old idea that each age has its own lens through which people see the world. In the Middle Ages, for example, “people could not help but experience themselves as determined or created by God.” They assumed that God’s plans encompassed their lives the way we assume the laws of physics do.

ok this is important: we need to think about the ways that "the spirit of the age" has to be manufactured, both in actual time and retrospectively. maybe there were plenty of medieval peasants who could help experiencing themselves as determined by god. either they stayed silent except with their immediate fellows, or they were burned alive. the reason we're not reading their books might be that there were no such people, that they couldn't publish, or that their works got expunged afterwards. were there cynical priests using the biblical yapyap to increase their power, status, sexual opportunities? obviously, and a lot of them, one suspects, didn't really accept the gassy claptrap constituting their unavoidable universal zeitgeist. but they continued to mumble the sort of enforced slogans which constitute the spirit of any age. so if there's a 'sprit of the age' we need to think about what is negated or repressed or concealed to make that possible, or for a generation or century to portray itself in a certain way. i don't think you can find any spirit of any age that doesn't produce skeptics, haters, negaters. we are social animals. we are also anti-social animals (this is what david brooks cannot understand; sometimes i think this is something only i understand), and every age is equivocal or contradictory. 

there's this notion that the hegelian or vico zeitgeist is just an inevitable set of assumptions we all share or something: a lens through which everybody sees everything until it somehow gets replaced with the next one. actually i think many more options are available at all locations than this would suggest. not that everything is possible at every location, but to start with, a straight negation of the commonplace doctrines or structures - christianity, maybe, or democracy, or individualism or collectivism - is i want to say always common. there are people who want only to believe what everyone else believes (well, an impossible aspiration!) but there are also people who want only to believe the opposite of what everyone else believes. and that's easy; it definitely does not require an impossible transcendence of one's own era etc: all it requires is sticking a negation on the sentences other people are producing. the mechanisms by which the catholic church enforced its doctrines are guaranteed to produce secret satanists and materialists, even among its own priesthood.

another factor in the manufacturing of zeitgeists is the work of the historian, which is, first of all, also bound up in the power situation. whether it is or not, you're working up the past into a narrative or trying to make a completely bewildering bristling past into something comprehensible. no way to avoid that! but the zeitgeist thing first of all both reflects and erases the actual epistemic power relations: 'naturalizes' them as the inevitable unfolding of history. that it is a consensus more or less that people 'could not help' but regard themselves as determined (?) by god is scary. it is a tribute to the power of institutions to shape the way they are portrayed in history. power projects an interpretation of itself and of the world in which it operates into the future, and often it is completely successful, and the archives in which the historian rummages are its archives.

but to any historian who really wants to still take the zeitgeist idea seriously, i would point out that it is a classic dormitive virtue approach: it summarizes or re-states your conclusion rather than explaining your data. not only that, but without a shitload of work, it appears to be a supernatural 'explanation': it was precisely that in hegel, where the zeitgeist was a moment in the developing self-consciousness of god. excuse me but what or where is the zeitgeist? it's everything, everywhere, but as impalpable as the aether. you'd be much better off doing what most historians actually do at this point: actually fociusing on mechanisms of communication and repression by which consensus opinions, if any, are formed etc.

i kept blogging that nobody really supported "don't ask" but that no one would kill it, speculating that they like a closet with you in it more than they might indicate or even believe. i was pleased and surprised to find out otherwise. indeed it was rather a shock and pleasure to see actual legislation moving through congress last week.

this is not what you necessarily expect in the msm: an excellent actual statement of what anarchism is. astonishingly it mentions josiah warren. (well he talked to dana ward, my man of the indispensable anarchy archives.) when i'm out on the road, many squealing philosophy groupies just like you ask me when my josiah warren book will be out. well i expected to be indexing it right now, but i haven't seen the proofs. so whether it'll really be april is anyone's guess. some of the delay has to be chalked up to me; it actually has been quite the little editing project.

 

ok cb here i go! actually, taking the thing all in all as best as i can tell from here probably the earth is growing warmer because of human carbon emissions. (really, i believe it more in the summer; sad how we keep consulting our own experience.) but i am not really compelled to declare an opinion on this matter: there are plenty of spokemen for that point of view, some of whom might have some credibility or the expertise at least to understand the data to some extent. my own contribution to carbon emissions is infinitesimal, and i'm not gonna really behave much differently either way.

what i am doing is complaining that in this situation it is fundamentally impossible to evaluate the data, and the data is constantly being...engineered to underpin certain sorts of advocacy. i think al gore, for example, actually saw climate change as a way to move into global governance, global regulation, as a motivation for an emerging world-state, a crisis we could only face by 'uniting.' others see it as a way to motivate an ecological rethinking of the way we live on earth: it's a wedge for a vision of sustainability and so on. these folks require the crisis to be as urgent as possible, and honestly they express fundamentally consensus positions on the left. 

there could also be climate-change-denial science, funded by carbon companies. but that stuff has been entirely quarantined from 'legitimate science.' now one has to be suspicious of 'science' funded by people with a huge financial stake in how it comes out. but one also has to be suspicious of the ways that the notion of 'legitimate science' is fundamentally defined by institutions which enforce a political consensus.

watcha watchin, crispy? exit through the gift shop, which i thought was a documentary about banksy, whom i regard as the most important artist of the last decade: the stuff is representational, made with great skill, funny, profound, and it actually has a variety of subjects other than art itself: these are all things that we need art for, and which art has ceased to provide. plus it is criminal, anarchist. an exquisite contrast would be to someone like jeff koons - who at least is funny, if empty - or matthew barney who just sucks. you know jeff koons's emptiness is indeed partly redeemed by his consciousness of his emptiness, and his consciousness of that consciousness, etc. but christ that doesn't actually give the crap any content.

now one thing exit through the gift shop might be is a hoax or parody of the art world, perhaps put on by banksy and shepard fairey, both of whose styles are sucked clean of meaning by the "filmmaker"/artist mr. brain wash. it's the kind of documentary where you think it's a documentary about banksy but however it's actually a documentary by banksy about making a documentary about banksy. either way, it certainly expresses banksy's disaffection with the art world, though in an arch superconscious way that is effortlessly taken up into the discourse it attacks. i could say i hope that's not the directon of banksy's work in the future. rather, the question is how to continue to do art outside of the venues of the artworld even while dealing with or accepting artworld success: ultimately the point is where these works are and how they got there, and for banksy that can't only be "here at moma," though that is inevitable.

whether the film is a hoax or not, it is seriously funny. (yo self-praise is no recommendation but i was teaching and even writing about banksy ecstatically long about 2003.)

 

there must be work on the problem of modeling in relation to science. but all parties to the debate had better start by acknowledging that computer modeling is not the same thing as empirical research into the actual world. it is empirical investigation, we might say, into a fabricated or virtual world. now i am not saying that modeling could have no value in science, but the question of the relation of the fabricated to the actual world has to arise as it does not, for example, when we're carbon dating a fossil. this is not to say that questions of the relation of representation to reality (let's say, of a hubble telescope image to a nebula it depicts) don't constantly arise in science of all kinds. but they arise in a different way or at a different level in computer modeling the earth's atmosphere. here we are faced with the specter of losing our grip on reality by the methods we've generated to investigate it: it would be easy to be seduced by the elegance or interestingness of some model and to traffic exclusively in representations. it is no doubt striking when the model predicts apocalypse, and more striking the more apocalyptic that apocalypse is, and how you deal with that is a challenge to your personality as well as your research. it would be interesting to realize somewhere down the line not that reality is really virtual or something but that we lost our grip on reality and became practitioners of a virtual and scholastic science. 

american education is in a state of extreme crisis. indeed, it has been in a state of extreme acute immediate excruciating crisis at every microsecond since 1850. very seriously there has certainly never been a moment in my lifetime in which the crisis in american education has not been at threat level incandescent crimson. so: i'm disarming. i think american education is fundamentally sound and good! i'm through suggesting "solutions" to "problems": that is itself the problem: it's conceived as a technical or economic arena of means and ends. but kids aren't means! so i say just freeze it in place precisely as it is, with no child etc. leave it alone. if you keep scratching it you'll just make it worse.

ok here's what i'm talking about. it is a leetle hard to stay in extreme crisis mode about the heat as you freeze ass and get buried in yet another blizzard. the task as the climate scientists conceive it would be to back-model the years-long cold snap so it turns out to be compatible with global warming, or better yet so that it turns out to be caused by global warming (cohen moves from very provisional speculations straight to: "The reality is, we’re freezing not in spite of climate change but because of it.") then the model you produced (involving snow cover in siberia in this case) is used to try to make people hold on to global warming in the face of the fact that they themselves are losing digits to frostbite in orlando. that one could produce such a model is not exactly tantamount to the fact that that is really what happened.

so ask yourself: what evidence would you or judah cohen accept as counting against the notion the the earth is growing warmer? what data would actually make it impossible to model the earth's atmosphere as growing warmer? or what would cause you to start with a question other than, how do we make this compatible with warming? when that is the question, there will always be an answer; you just have to keep refining the model, or throwing into it another interesting speculation. and it is the question: or else you won't be publishing in our journals, employed in our universities, and so on, because any other approach shows that you're not doing good science, = you have reactionary politics. it is impossible to assess the quality of the evidence for global warming: it is produced in an atmosphere in which only dogma and self-delusion can possibly emerge, in which the purpose of the research is moral grandstanding and public policy prescription. i think we might want to worry about the way 'science' and 'evidence' or even 'reality' ("The reality is, we’re freezing not in spite of climate change but because of it") are used in this discourse: their rhetorical function. in the course of mounting your case, y'all don't want to discredit your entire model of human knowledge and send us back to sheer faith or something.

teena marie's race dysmorphia was interesting, and pretty original and transgressive for a girl (though you might ponder someone like, say, anita o'day). on the other hand, on a list of bad ideas, a "tempestuous" love affair with rick james is approximately at the top. and honestly i don't love the records, though i've worked at it a bit.

i wouldn't recommend to anarchists a campaign of bombings or assassinations. that more or less discredited the whole movement a century ago. seriously i don't know how you worked up the idea that blowing the hand off a mail handler in the basement of the chilean embassy was a blow for liberation, but i'd think some more.

i actually think the climate-change people wreck their position by the thoroughness of their defense. so desperate are they to convince you and make you do something about it that they seek to render their position impregnable, which only makes it pitiable. the position is this: (1) you must distinguish between weather and climate, so a cold winter doesn't show anything about climate change. (2) but a warmer than average winter is a clear harbinger of our hotter future. (3) but a series of colder-than-average winters is caused by global warming. etc. the evidence is unequivocal! because the hypothesis is consistent with any possible observation, or more strongly would actually be confirmed by the observation that p and by the observation that ~p.

here's the problem with modeling, i believe: if winter is cold over area x, we back-fill the model to produce the phenomenon by or compatibly with global warming. that's why modeling is not the same as experimentation: you are producing your own data, which amazingly enough confirms your expectations. see a modeled environment is compatible with contradictions in a certain way: so we start with a set of data showing colder-than-average temps in the northern hemisphere and then see if we can produce a model on which that occurs compatibly with global warming. yes! but then say you took a set of data that showed temps in the northern hemisphere getting warmer. could you produce a model that would lead to that result compatibly with global warming? of course. but then the fact that we produced the first model is adduced as scientific evidence that the earth is heating up. not what we'd call a good methodology; it's more a rhetoric of persuasion i suppose.

in a real world, global warming cannot have both the effect of heating up the northern hemisphere and cooling it down at the same time. but in a computer model wherein time is traversed again and again and the world consists of the data fed in by the staff, there's no reason why it can't. but you need a lot more than that to actually show anything.

go, lukashenko, go!

the aesthetics of totalitarianism will never be beat. (Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko delivers his speech to delegates of fourth National Assembly in Minsk, Belarus, Monday, Dec. 6, 2010.) color scheme is very lisa frank.

sharks wary of drunk serbs

i just want to say that this reporting by priest and arkin, like the previous series is important. we really have moved toward a secret-police/everybody'sa--potential-informer type of society. to me the response to 9.11 shows that, as one might put it, we're still in the twentieth century, the era of "history" or the state. basic strategies of power have not been transformed. 'secrecy' or 'privacy' might be out-of-fashion in our zuckerbergish society; it is still the fundamental condition for the security state. that's why the wikileaks model is interesting, why it challenges the state to adapt or die, or would if the leaks got more and better.

meanwhile the obama administration shows no less enthusiasm for the whole machinery than did the bush administration. very few governments after a peaceful transition are going to dismantle to standing powers they inherit, one reason the state is a snowball.

huge hat or tiny head? it's always hard to tell with dictators.

 

blog of bradley manning's lawyers: "the law offices of david e. coombs."

(thanks chris bray)

rock on, john conyers! (thanks, adam.)

just added aboniblog to the blogroll. john herman is an interesting philosopher: personal. original. and remarkably sensible.

ps i'm kinda proud of the most recent attack on quantum physics or hawking's use of it, below. i wonder if i could find someone inside that discourse who'd want to reply?

We will see that, like a particle, the universe doesn't just have a single history, but every possible history, each with its own probability; and our observations of its current state affect its past and determine the different histories of the universe, just as the observations of the particles in the double-slit experiment affect the particles' past. That analysis will show how the laws of nature in our universe arose from the big bang. (Grand Design, chapter 4)

i'm going to skip the disclaimer deferring to the super-intelligence of richard feynman etc. also i'm not gonna take another shot at the retroactive past right now. but i just want to point out that the idea that 'the' universe originated uniquely in a big bang is incompatible with the rest of the passage. the universe has every possible origin. surely the steady state theorists weren't wrong: if that is one of the possible histories, it is precisely as actual as the universe(s) that originated in the big bang.

i think hawking is going to argue that we don't need god to explain anything. true, true, but if god is possible then he's as actual as you and me (which is not very, i admit, in this cosmology). if it is possible that god created the universe etc...the only rational position is both to believe and not...in anything, really.

"richard feynman was a colorful character," writes hawking. and an incredibly dull old sod who never recovered from being dropped on his head as a baby. and also he didn't exist at all. he was mercurial like that, as well as colorful.

is a universe that obeys newton's laws all the way down a possible universe? then it is an actual universe, and since in that universe the quantum events that give rise to the 'every possible history' approach do not occur, that universe does not have all possible histories. so if that universe is possible, then it is not the case that the universe has every possible history. 

what we're supposedly looking for is an 'elegant' theory that will help us explain future observations. (elegance was #1 to future observations' #4 in hawking's standards for the goodness of theories). you might want to ponder just how elegant 'the universe has every possible history' is. i propose that there could be no less elegant theory, no lusher or more teeming ontology. that's fun! that's cool! but by hawking's own standards it is bad. (well, i guess strictly speaking we might get an even more lush ontology from the claim that the universe has all possible and all impossible histories. i'm kind of surprised that that wasn't hawking's approach. perhaps further double-slit experiments will demonstrate that as well; but at this point it's only speculation. still it seems to explain a lot!)

of course elegance is a complex concept, as hawking acknowledges, and for all i know this gives you the fewest or the simplest equations. but in the old ockham's razor sense ('don't multiply entities without necessity') this is, very precisely, the least elegant possible account.

on the other hand, with regard to the standard of delivering predictions likely to be borne out in future observations, the idea that the universe has every possible history works incredibly well. i predict, with regard to every possible event, that the event will actually occur. there i'm done! and science is entirely finished. thank god because that shit was wack.

alright then let me try this: the co-actuality of all possible histories (or indeed of more than one) is itself impossible. that is, considered as a single unique item every possible history is possible. hard to quibble there. but the co-actuality of histories in which richard feynman, that particular person, exists in one and not in the other is not possible. or what can we mean by 'possible'? probably hawking has physical possibility in mind along the lines of the laws of physics; would he recognize that it is impossible for feynman both to exist and not to exist? (to be clear: it is possible that feynman existed. and it is possible that feynman didn't exist. but it is not possible that feynman both existed and didn't exist.) if not, then i think he ought to drop the physical laws too; it would not of course then follow from the fact that these laws hold that they do not also fail to hold. 

just re-watched v for vendetta. and of course, how could i not love that movie? (i have reservations about alan moore as a theoretician; but then you might have noticed that i have reservations about everyone except myself as a theoretician. and i'm not so sure about myself.) anyway it puts me in mind of what i actually wanted to be when i grew up: the perfect revolutionary. i wanted to study, you know, bomb-making, locksmithing, guerilla warfare, survival, disguise, propaganda, etc etc. and i was pretty serious: i was actually doing...things. and i made some headway in each of these areas.

now i was 15 in 1973, and as the years went by it dawned on me, as it dawned on a lot of folks, that there wasn't going to be a revolution. also it is a bit hard for an anarchist to contemplate the actual mechanisms and results of actual revolutions. none of the twentieth century revolutions eventuated in anything that resembled the rhetoric of the revolutionaries. and every successful revolution of the twentieth century eventuated in a totalitarian regime. and i got sidetracked of course: love, poetry, philosophy, drugs. i remained committed to the ideas, which i found in emma goldman or developed for myself, and i have tried to express them or stay true to the anti-authoritarian impulse, of which i have found over the years that i have an inexhaustible supply. but i also made some sort of peace with some sorts of authority (even my own: the hardest task). 

anyway, no one can be v, who was a comic book because he was a super-hero. no one is going to save us or return us to our supposedly true or pristine selves. but you know i have known moments of regret that i didn't give it more of a try. v is always on about the power of words and ideas. i suppose i might say that i have not witnessed this power in any very potent form. my writing has had infinitesimal effects, and i note that v wasn't sitting around writing books, even if he was always quoting shakespeare with questionable purport. but honestly i'm not sure we've seen much from the power of ideas since the 19th century. 

hawking and mlodinow go to great lengths to avoid the word 'true' in the grand design. they constantly refer to theories they like or defend as 'good' or (very often) 'real.' i see why they don't want to open this can of worms. but just resorting to different terms really doesn't help. when they say a theory is real, they mean it's true, and that means it guides research and isn't falsified etc: again a pragmatist theory, in a pretty unsophisticated version. but using 'real' here is just odd. a theory is real if it has actually been articulated: theories that aren't real are theories that have never been formulated, or theories (for example) put forward by fictional characters in novels or something.

let's say that to say a theory or assertion is true is to say that it allows us accurately to make predictions about the future, or that it is true or true enough as long as it is not contradicted by observations. so i've begun the hawking, and he doesn't claim to generate a theory of truth. he can't, in some way, because then among other things he'd be squarely in a realm in which no particular observation or calculation could help him. he'd be in philosophy, in short. however there is a theory of truth nevertheless (and no observation or calculation can help him): "A model is a good model if it: (4) Makes detailed predictions about future observations that can disprove or falsify the model if they are not borne out." so the model makes prediction p at time t1. at t2 an observation is made that's incompatible with p (but cf quine: in fact no observation is incompatible with any theory). however, to say that it's true that that observation has actually been made at t2 is to predict that this claim, p2 (such-and-such an observation has been made), will not be falsified at some t3, which is to say that that claim, p3, will not be falsified at some t4. and so on. sometimes a view entails an infinite or vicious regress. this view entails an infinite or vicious progress, and that every assertion (even those about the past) is an infinite assertion about an infinite future. i believe that in this case no model can actually be falsified.

such a theory of truth cannot of course be attributed to hawking etc.; c.s. peirce is a plausible candidate.

anyway, here's one reason that calculations and observations can't help you generate a good theory of truth: because all calculations and observations must be deployed within a conception of truth; if the equation is not true, then generating a theory of truth from it (supposing such a thing makes sense) just takes you further afield. indeed no theory of truth can be established by any evidence. for one thing the question of the truth of the theory of truth itself arises, and a theory of truth (for example, the pragmatic theory) might be true according to itself (it helps, or whatever). that does not establish that it's true, any more than writing in purple ink 'a sentence is true if and only if it is written in purple ink' establishes that a sentence is true if and only if it is written in purple ink. ( hawking retreats to the 'goodness' of a model, probably precisely to avoid the thornbush of truth. but either he actually does mean truth or at any rate something just as problematic.) in all honesty i think theories of truth are articles of faith, or rather they are inchoate expressions of commitment to a certain sort of world. you are not going to be able to do without such commitments.

 

can't stop bloggin! one more thing on hawking: the world is not mind-dependent. the mind is world-dependent. (andy clark puts forward one version of this truth, for example.) now the notion that the world is mind-dependent is profoundly anti-naturalistic. if darwin is in the right world, then the human mind arises in a process of adaptation to an actual pre-existing environment, and is comprehensible in terms of the demands that environment poses, the objective facts with which it confronts a creature. but the hawking approach asserts the opposite: that the environment arises in response to us, in a profound and insane sense: we create its past. so if you still wanted a little evolution, you'd be forced to conclude that the mind arose from adaptation to an environment retrojected into the past by that very mind: we actually are making right now the past that gave rise to us. the human mind in this scenario is an uncaused cause, a prime mover; a god. now i note that the ability of these folks to swallow absurdities appears to know no limit. but these particular absurdities are completely incompatible with the sciences that ended up giving rise to them.

wait. the airforce is blocking the nytimes? i think they're going to have to essentially block all news sources if they don't want their people finding out what's in those memos. surely you can't let our american heroes (alternately, slaves) watch cnn or access google news. well at least we're getting some idea of where we actually live. 

V!

Witnesses said the gunman walked up to a podium, spray painted a red "V" with a circle around it before he began firing. 

well i wouldn't really start by shooting up the panama city school board, irritating though it might be. but i do note that we're in a kind of anarchist phase: assange and sprouting vs for vendetta are omnipresent. this might prove interesting! if your world hasn't taught you to hate political power, you are incapable of learning.

i'm 52 years old and i have made it a strict policy not to leer at young women. not only that but i'm in a celibate phase. but ok ok, i have a big old crush on natalie portman.

damn, girl.

 

when people interview ron paul, the thrust of the questions is basically: you're a fucking nut, aren't you? how can you take these incomprehensible extremist positions? and then he just enacts his palpable sanity before you with a mild demeanor, compelling and interesting actual points and arguments etc. there hardly could be a better spokesman for his kind of position. if he had any charisma, that would be treated as an aspect of his dangerous craziness. but looking squarely at this person and believing he's crazy is just impossible. in this interview he went on to give an unqualified, completely compelling defense of wikileaks' right to publish and the importance of the documents (unfortunately that's not in this bit). in response to the claim that people have died or will die as a result of the leaks, he scoffed, then pointed out that many, many more people have died because of government secrecy: he adduced iraq. etc.

i note that the primary outlet for wikileaks in msm, the guardian, is down, at least from my computer. has been for a couple of hours. routine glitch or dod/cia? if the latter, i think there might be a bit of an international problem! can y'all bring it up?

rock on, michael moore. read down to the end of that piece. this is truly amazing, but they are now producing such damning facts as that julian assange has an overdue library book. 

He also appears to have absconded with a copy of a book called Introduction to Non-Classical Logic from the Melbourne University library. Notes on the library's website read: "Not returned by Julian Assange, March 2004. Despite many attempts by staff he was unable to be contacted. Still missing 2006."

i happen to have a copy of "introduction to non-classical logic" on my shelf (it's not the university of melbourne's), which is precisely where i realized that i like old-fashioned two-valued (true/false) logic, unlike hawking, for example. (non-classical logics are multi-valued logics, and intro doesn't stop with hawking's mere three: let's axiomatize a seventeen-valued logic. eat that, steve!) that julian assange would even borrow such a book, much less never bring it back (i'm thinking because it became central to his personality, like elizabeth gilbert is central to yours) puts him in the category of mykindaweirdo.

by the way, you might want to take this as an object lesson not only on freedom and the subversion of power, but on the passive voice. "he was unable to be contacted"? strikes me as unlikely, though i'm sure assange was frustrated if that was the case. and that he was unable to be contacted (comatose, maybe? hermetically sealed in an empty room?) surely does not follow from the fact that y'all were unable to contact him. perhaps you were unable to contact him because, as your sentence indicates, there is no you.

well that's kinda pricey! cheaper on kindle.



btw, i will do some kind of (mixed) review of the kindle, which i've been using for a couple of months now.

ps don't buy this book on a sudden intellectual whim! it's gonna take a few years to get to the point where the "introduction" starts. if you don't already have predicate calculus, model theory etc on board, just say no.

nyc schools' new #2 believes in more testing. i ask the students of nyc: where is your aspiration? truly, the future is in your hands. for every bubble filled with a no 2 pencil, an act of vandalism. they can't do this shit to you if you refuse. these clowns think they run your school (not to mention your life and mind). educate them on that.

right now on animal planet: "A study of Michael Jackson's tight bond with his pet chimpanzee, Bubbles."