cheese it, the cops!

Prediction to the Fourth Degree

My dad told me that a good manager was right more than 51% of the time. I think he was right -- great managers and leaders probably get it right around 60% of the time, and generally get the big things right. Republicans tend to get facts and theories and bullshit confused and are seldom right but their voters don't care that much. Like heroin, most Republican voters lose in the long run, but it's all about the rush! Quants generally get all the minor shit absolutely spot on, but punt the big things. Go figure.

 

My buddy Eric "El Norte Chingasa" Garland or something like that makes his living doing predictions, and he tends to be right often enough that he gets calls from moderately important people who ask him reasonably important questions for which he must provide reasonably coherent answers (Shit, man, who knows...it's all stuff. Stuff happens... Not acceptable.) that are mostly correct. Eric is not an economist. He's close enough to right to supplement his wife's income as a physician.

Crispin is a philosopher and card trickster. He doesn't care about being right until he does, and then it's usually too late. But, Crispin is right about 50% of the time and when he's wrong, it's usually due to some misplaced faith in human beings.

I'm right reasonably often -- I am not an economist. I don't get paid to be a prognosticator, so it doesn't matter. But, the only guys I'm aware of who've reasonably correct over the past few years have been the Keynesians. And of course, nobody including the US did what they recommended. So, although long, worth reading. Even considering the source...

Daniel Dennett and Free Will and Salon

I went to see the doctor of philosophy
With a poster of Rasputin and a beard down to his knee
He never did marry or see a B-grade movie
He graded my performance, he said he could see through me
I spent four years prostrate to the higher mind, got my paper
And I was free. -- Ray and Saliers

When I turn to philosophy and pick up a new work, the technical stuff makes me think that perhaps the idea to burn the Great Library of Alexandria was not such a bad one after all. Langugae that serves only to drive the potential reader away deserves to be forgotten. Of course, doctoral disseratations don't succeed so much by provoking new thought as by providing variations on an accepted theme of bullshit. The great thinkers succeed in reaching us by doing other things that producing tomes suitable more for tombs that thought, realization and excited discussion.

Daniel Dennett is an interesting and provocative thinker; while I like his simile about human beings as "moist robots", he seems here to be edging away from that. The robot part takes us so far, and then there's an entirely different set of functions,problems and issues. Two things I liked here is the issue of intentionality -- free will requires philosophical intention, that is, conscienious direction and awareness and it requires the ability to recognize and prevent manipulation. The moral actor has to go into situations with eyes wide open and a poker face. The other, which I think is implied, is that the initial reaction to radically new perspectives seems to be to regard it as either naive or cynical, until you think about it.

My other thought is simple. I find Dennett's technical philosophy, the neuroscientist-philosopher stuff incomprehensible, but when he writes or speaks to communicate with actual living people, he's very good indeed. Is that a trend? Crispin's thought is much the same way, although since he doesn't babble about neurons and synapses and blood volume and all  the rest, he's more approachable. Sartre was the same way -- you can read "Being and Nothingness", or you can read "The Words" or "No Exit and three Plays" and  the first will drive you to distraction, solitary despair and  isolated absinthe sucking through a sugar cube; the others will engage, provoke conversastion and maybe...cause thought. 

Maybe even in Salon...it's a thought. 

 

idealized

one thing about the assertions of the observer-dependence of reality in physics: they are not about any actual observers or human beings, but about idealized or stipulated observers. so, wigner's mathematical reconstruction of observer-dependence cannot and does not engage with actual observers. he says, for example, well if this person has a sense impression in this situation, then so does that person, in the same situaton. he even stipulates that two of his perople will answer the same to queries: did you see a flash? yes. otherwise you can't mathematize this at all. but look, any actual particular person in any actual particular situation might be asleep, or hallucinating, or blind, or distracted, or psychotic, etc. and of course actual people respond all sorts of different ways to questions, and if you asked an actual observer whether they saw a flash, you might get, "who's asking?" or "eat me" or "do you think shirley hates me?" or "christ, what is it with you and flashes?" we stipulate idealized observers who have the same experiences and the same responses in the same circumstances.

now, think about that for a moment. these people are asserting flatly that the universe literally depends ontologically on idealized observers we just made up. space and time, what are they? they are aspects of non-existent experience in the non-existent heads of non-existent people. the fictional characters we just invented are the actual creators of reality. it would be hard to come up with a more bizarre, mmmm, religious hypothesis: reality, including we ourselves, originates in and depends on the fictional sense experiences of characters we created.

now why do we stipulate identical observers, or make up idealized observers? because actually, we do believe in an external world, and we can't deal at all with the entailments of the subjectivism we stumbled so incompetently into. if you were serious about the idea that reality was dependent on actual observers, you could not do science at all, nor should you. so, because we are stuck in this idea of observer-dependence, we have to try to get something like a world out of subjective experiences so we can do science at all. so then we just stipulate idealized observers to make observatiion tantamount to objectivity. i can't tell, but i think wigner's equations might work fine even if a flash is a burst of photons rather than a sense impression in a stipulated subjectivity: something happening out there rather than in the nowhere head of nobody. i've got this funny feeling that even wigner believes that there could be actual photon bursts happening outside his own mind.

so, on this account, physics is not about the universe or reality or something, it is about the 'experiences' of fictional characters. is that really how you guys want it? that's your most considered account of what you are doing? because surely it would be sensible to lose interest in the whole thing at that point.

but even if that's what some of these folks say they are doing, due to a series of confusions, it's not in fact what they are doing. they are studying the actual universe as it exists out there; otherwise this stuff would have no practical application, etc. what's really wrong is not what's going on in the collider, but the super-half-assed framework it's being jammed into. i'm just betting that we can do better at reconstructing the basic conceptual structure around the actual experiments and results. lee smolin and others are trying, i think.

wigner 2

i realize that i am getting a bit pissy and obsessed, but man i just feel this wigner thing is wacky at a hundred junctures. he defines the "wave functions" that describe the universe as being concerned exclusively with "sense impressions": given an impression of a flash at t, there is x probability of an impression of a flash at t1. oh man i don't even know where to start on this. first of all, i don't believe in sense impressions, and there is a whole theory of perception here which is controversial, unargued, and for which there can be no scientific evidence in my view. i'll send you to j.l. austin's sense and sensibilia: then you can watch the flashes as the idea of sense impressions explodes. but anyway, if you just define science at the outset as being concerned exclusively with sense impressions, you again don't need anything else to establish observer-dependence. only it is an unbelievably wrong characterization of science, or at a minimum one that i believe wigner cannot get anywhere close to establishing.

'i have direct knowledge only of my sensations', writes wigner, at the same moment austin was blowing this up. so, would you say i have no direct knowledge of my cat? or i don't know it's raining; i know only that i am having certain sensations? funny but in the usual case i have no beliefs about, much less knowledge about, my own sensations. but i do know it's raining out there. it is not raining in my head, because little drops of water cannot fall from the sky in my head. here's an assertion: i know that it is raining outside as directly as i can know anything.

materialism, argues wigner, is 'incompatible with quantum theory'. why? because we can doubt the existence of the material world but we can't doubt the existence of our own consciousness and the sense impressions allegedly contained therein. i don't even know where to start here either. that surely has nothing to do with quantum theory; it's just descartes or epistemological foundationalism based on sense contents in a representational theory of mind. i believe this whole position has been exploded within philosophy, but even if it hasn't been, surely we can see that wigner (a) isn't doing science, (b) is deploying uncritically a series of highly problematic philosophical claims, and (c) does nothing at all to defend those claims. (to defend them, if they were not indefensible, would take a whole career.)

hammering wigner 1

i'm going to pull a little physics back out of comment threads to the top. i am in quite the little dialogue with my cousin boaz nash, who is a physicist. the paper by eugene wigner that boaz brings my attention to is a really clear statement of the process by which physicists got from experiments to absolute idealism. of course, in my opinion there is no possible legitimate move from one to the other. i am going to gear some comments to quotes.

"The statement that [something] 'exists' means only that: (a) it can be measured, hence uniquely defined, and (b) that its knowledge is useful for understanding past phenomena and in helping foresee future events."

this is an extremely clear example of what i am complaining about. so, where did eugene wigner get his his theory of existence? it should be completely clear that he brought it to and did not derive it from science: no empirical data bear on this definition of existence at all. also, this is just not what anyone, including eugene wigner, does mean by the claim that something exists. i exist, eugene, can i be measured and uniquely defined? is that what it means to say i exist? (b) is just the pragmatic theory of truth again, and i say that it is wrong. but even if it isn't, it is not any sort of scientific result.

now, wigner came up with a series of important equations for quantum mechanics. but, his definition of 'existence': how much critical scrutiny has he subjected it to? has he considered any objections whatever? not to put too fine a point on it, but is he any more competent to define 'existence' than i am to generate important equations? does he give any argument for this? and is anything else necessary to make the world dependent on consciousness? he is doing philosophy, but carelessly, incompetently, and without any actual work to make the definitions and theories stick. he is so not entitled to these assumptions, and i think that in their absence, none of this other stuff about consciousness and reality follows at all.

if 'exists' means 'can be measured', the observer-dependence of absolutely everything follows immediately, ok? the science is neither here not there. 

when a scientist starts defining notions like 'existence', 'truth', 'reality' and so on, they often want to be taken to be sort of informal: like, this is what i practically mean by 'truth', so now let's go on. it's almost like it's a trivial assumption: here's what i'll mean when i say something exists: it can be measured etc. like it's a practical, hands-on characterization of scientific procedure, or the underbrush you have to clear out to get to the actual work. only, no it's not: it's an entire metaphysical theory of the universe for which there is no argument, and it governs the way the results of experiments are formulated. in general, everywhere, this is the problem with science: the assumptions one brings very very often control the results and are very very often accepted uncritically.

honestly, i want all the physicists in the world, starting with hawking, to withdraw these claims immediately in their entirety and go back to what they can actually do. i just kind of wish i was a macarthur genius or a nobel prize winner. then i would publicly demand that the claims of observer-dependence be withdrawn until the totally-destructive objections can be answered. this really is a very long and very bad mistake, i think!

here's a non-technical, non-epistemology, non-physics entry. i frigging love john wall.

 

k=tb

suddenly i have very much warmed to experimental philosophy. once, i was skeptical or even dismissive, for one of the things that very much attracted me to philosophy was that, unlike in many less rigorous disciplines, you could do your research lying in bed, maybe with a bunch of books lying around, maybe not. but however, experimental philosophers are vindicating my theory of knowledge, which, if i'm recalling correctly, is profoundly radical yet mind-humpingly simple. i conclude from this that their research methods are unassailable. k=tb, baby.

one thing i'll say for 'knowledge is merely true belief' that perhaps i didn't say back in the day: it's pretty darn economical, oh, elegant really. i think knowledge is a richer notion than is captured in analytic epistemology. but let's restrict ourselves to an account of 'S (a person) knows that p (a proposition [or something that can be true or false])'. i actually am not quite sure how to value simplicity as a quality of theories; i am not sure that a simpler theory is likelier to be true than a complex one. but S knows that p iff S believes p and p is true (or 'S knows that p iff p and S believes that p') is an extraordinarily simple theory (iff is 'if and only if'), and i assert that it does a surprisingly good job of covering 'the phenomena', which i make out to be the ways the term is centrally or paradigmatically used in ordinary language. that it can do that is what i was arguing in my early papers, and the survey materials lend at least some support to that notion. the simplicity might be compelling at this point because of the baroque refinements to jtb-style approaches post-gettier.

[or, to review: the usual account of knowledge is jtb: justified true belief. obviously, tb is more economical. also, that little j thing or whatever we may call a similar condition, or multiplying conditions, begins to become truly rococo: dude it leads into endless labyrinths, worlds full of barn replicas.]

i generated k=tb in jim cargile's graduate seminar in epistemology at uva in the late 80s. it was explicitly an attempt to display the philosophical power of sheer perversity, a not entirely atypical bit of playful grandstanding: alright, what position is no one taking? i literally built a grid of theories and saw a big hole, and one thing about finding a fissure in the taxonomy like that is that if you jump in, you see a bunch of assumptions other people are making, which you then can try to undermine. but there could have been other perverse approaches and here's why i went for this one: it leans on truth like a mofo. as david sackris and james beebe put it, "bringing about the truth of p is (except in exceptional circumstances) not a task that falls to S. Rather, that 'task' falls to reality" (9). everyone at the time was willing to delete the truth condition; i had a lot of more or less rortyan gard contemporaries. my approach was designed to fit into a reality program. (cargile thought it was ridiculous, but in a great way or just the way i'd hoped: blasphemy! he cried, with a big old smile. also he always called me 'jean-paul'. he gave the final version for the class/first version for the world a 'B+', if i recall.)

another motivation at that moment, however, was that (almost secretly) i was reading kierkegaard, and really, as people sensed when the stuff angered them, i was going to try to derationalize knowledge; i was going to let your faith count as knowledge if its propositional content was true, i was going to encourage you to intuit, i was going to claim that even reason rested on faith, and so on. i was going to argue that there were many sources of knowledge, reason/science being only some, anarchizing epistemology. the main purpose of the papers was to take the sting out of the actual results, to show that it wasn't irrationalist at all. well, maybe it wasn't, necessarily, without some ancillary arguments. i was going to sneak all that up on you after i pulled the rational part out of the conceptual analysis of knowledge.

i did get more convinced of it as time went by; also it was my hobby to go here and there to defend it against various onslaughts, so it provided amusement if nothing else; i did delight in its perversity, or even in the fact that everyone thought it was ridiculous. some people - including some eminent epistemologists - became genuinely angry, which is also not the worst thing in the world necessarily. it was a bit of a performance piece, but people did sincerely think it was absurd. i started touring it to little conferences and stuff as a grad student and had worked it through a million counter-examples before the first version came out in american philosophical quarterly. i certainly had a notion that it would be my little reputation-maker, that i'd be associated with that idea primarily. i'm glad it didn't quite turn out that way, i suppose.

there was a little sensation at the time when the second paper came out in the journal of philosophy, i guess, and i do remember defending the whole thing in front of an angry auditorium at an apa; i remember robert audi getting pretty hostile, e.g. but really, the thing blew over. i think one problem is this: if k=tb, too many problems on which people have spent too much time do not arise. if it were true, it really would mean a lot of the epistemology of the last x decades (again, gettier and after) was barking up the wrong tree. it just had no place in the line of the discourse at that time, is another way to put it. it was one of a number of times i mistakenly thought that people would find it delightful to be provoked.

 no one would publish my book on the topic, which must have been profoundly frustrating at the time. they sent it out specifically to be refereed by people who had already attacked the argument in one venue or another. for awhile, they were assigning my papers to grad students at arizona - a big center of analytic epistemology - as an exercise, like a take-home final: what has gone so terribly wrong with this argument? an object-lesson in sophism. i used to get some emails every year or two with refutations from grad students (always on the same predictable lines). i actually didn't hate that; i've always thought the whole thing was a fun little thing to play with, and it came from a grad seminar in the first place, for god's sake.

there has been a trickle of references to it, but really it just dissolved. in a way, that was ok; it let me go on to other things, like the political stuff; otherwise i might have spent a career on it. after some years i got profoundly tired of the same objections and replies, and really wanted to go write about art or something. sriously, for a very long time if i was walking the halls somewhere with a name tag, philosophers would snap their fingers, like 'aren't you that guy?' it got to where i'd be: have you read my stuff on race?  i started pretending not to remember my own argument, and then i really started not remembering my own argument.

but i definitely also still feel that this sucker has legs. people are going to keep circling back to it, i think. there are problems, but there are strategies for dealing with them. i think beebe and sackris show some of these better than i did. if i myself were going to return to a defense, i'd need to bone up on my own arguments! also rethink some. also it would need to be put into relation to developments in epistemology since the early '90s, like the 'truth-makers' stuff and timothy williamson's work in epistemology, to which it is interestingly related. 

i feel very distant from the person who generated this idea, so maybe if i could be permitted to comment on its strengths? it is still out there as a fundamental challenge. no one has dispensed with it. (people were relieved to regard lycan's attack as decisive. not even close, i say, as beebe and sackris point out. but lycan reviewed the manuscript for one publisher or another.) the fact that many important epistemological problems do not arise if k=tb is right is not necessarily, all things considered, a strike against it. i still endorse it as a theory within limits (man it's going to be a little hard to deal with 'propositions' in my later ontology), but there should at least be a longer line of debate about it.

american philosophical quarterly, knowledge is merely true belief

journal of philosophy, why knowledge is merely true belief

(sorry about paywalls etc; maybe you can get them through jstor if you have a library connection).

knowledge without justification and the kindle version

epistemic minimalism, the stub

frank hofmann, in defense of some sartwellian insights

ken morris, concerning sartwell's minimalist thesis

Not about being deranged, about becoming deranged

 

 

Latest piece from Vets: http://www.veteranstoday.com/2014/12/20/merry-christmas-is-what-they-tell-me/ I thought I was writing a music piece...go figure?

 

Comments are again fascinating...how anyone can go to the places my readers go from where I start amazes me and kind of scares me. Now, get in line with the 200 Mosaic laws or the Zionists will send a drone after you. 

 

Christmas should not be about being a crazy sonofabitch. That's for New Year's, President's Day and St Patrick's Day. Christmas may be about hope, peace, love overcome by futility and inadequacy and frustration -- Frank Costanza beating a man senseless trying to buy a doll for George and thus inventing Festivus, which is a logical reaction to stimulus -- but it's not about being a crazy sonofabitich conspiracy nut. Didn these people not get the memo?

 

Anyway, nobody ever wrote a good song about President's Day..except maybe this one. 

 

the greatest story ever told

people do look awfully grim about the war between kim jong un and seth rogen, but i just want to point out that it is the greatest story ever, just a complete delight. when 10th graders in 2153 read about american history, seth rogen will be the major figure, the turning point, like lincoln or napoleon. we have lived through the moment when seth rogen went from so-lame-it's-funny comedian to world-bestriding colussus. this will be remembered as the era in which americans followed seth rogen unquestioningly to our doom. the seth rogen era, world war seth, was always where the inevitable process of history was going to end up. now only james franco can save or redeem us.

send in the clowns

i very much like the idea of sovereign nations at war with entertainment conglomerates. but, if i were kim jong-un - which, for all i know, i may well be - and i was interpreting comedies as acts of war, i would be worried. in fact, i'm surprised deterrence didn't work. alright you messed with our seth rogen/james franco movie? guess what, de-hack immediately or we will send in will farrell. dude we will come at you in waves of comedy annihilation. we'll assemble a unit under cedric the entertainer or tina fey. seriously, are you going to mess with tina fey? your nation will die laughing, son. this will make nuclear warheads look like kittens. when we're done, you'll wish we had opted for mere regime change.

cybernonterrorism

i don't think an act is terrorism if no one gets physically damaged. plus i think screaming terrorism is the whole world's hobby right now. i'd like to move from stopping the terrorists to stopping the phrase 'the terrorists'. but anyway: no, leaking a pre-release of your next film is not terrorism. even leaking your most embarrassing email moment is not terrorism. you could start killing people and blowing shit up this way, possibly, but until you do, you ain't no terrorist.

forward!

reflecting back on it, i had an interesting experience in grad school. at hopkins, working on my ma, i took some classes with stanley fish (and also played on his intramural softball and basketball teams!), and then my ph.d. experience at uva centered around rorty. indeed, i first studied rorty (consequences of pragmatism) with fish. now, these were both actually rather funny and ironic men who loved life (well, fish is still that, no doubt). but it was hard to miss a sense of the end: certainly of philosophy, pictured as so tired and over, but vaguely of everything, like western culture and values, meaning, and stuff. also, um, the real world. rorty projected an air of sort-of-amused disappointment that anyone would still go get a ph.d., years after he said the whole thing was over with heidegger. that someone still believed in reality in 1986 just sort of saddened him.

they both also affirmed some form of liberal democracy and other positive values, and these affirmations were sincere and grew more intense as time went on. yet there was always that deflationary wry detachment, that shrug of the shoulders, that well-i-can't-seem-to-think-of-anything-better so, whatever. so that is actually how i think of the postmodern moment, because that was the bit of it i was in. it was attractive in its way, and they were good advertisements for their positions: fundemantally decent people. and yet it all made me want to...begin again.

 you just have to find a way to reaffirm or go on after that, right? like you're after the end - even then it was getting longer and longer since the end of art, the death of the author, flies ditching fly-bottles, and so on and so forth: the pomo thinkers declared themselves to be a dead end, which leaves you in a bit of a quandary if you're trying to pull together a dissertation topic under their tutelage. (i think a fair amount of pomo theory could be accounted for by the disappointment of the left in that era, the dreams that ran aground on reagan and thatcher, the obvious evil and decline of communism.) but really if you're after after the end or whatever, you just...go on, don't you? that end shit got boring and odd, like a strange tic or not-quite-right recurrent phrase. and it was the teleological assumptions that these figures brought to bear - which they in turn inherited from their teachers - that brought on the disappointment or even exhaustion.

but i say to you straight up that we have not yet begun to inquire. there is plenty to do. sally forth!

i have a funny feeling we may actually be in for regime change in north korea. you just prodded power where it lives: in the $. certainly, there is every justification for a massive cyber-attack on north korea, and i'm betting a lot of governments here and there are dying to try out their new weapons. the insane brutality and demented totalitarianism of the regime wasn't enough to get people going; this might be, though.

keepin it real in the popomo era

one mark of this period in philosophy is its realism, by which i mean that philosophy in this period is convinced of the existence of a world independent of consciousness (or, let's start with that; believe me i have worked more carefully on formulating this). now one would say it's a return to realism, only guess what? western philosophy has been profoundly and almost continuously anti-realist throughout the modern era. descartes, locke, hume, kant, hegel, husserl: all locked us in a world of ideas and impressions and sensations. carnap constructed a universe out of "auto-psychological objects". hermeneutics and much of pomo phil (rorty, e.g.; but, wittgenstein, derrida), went textual instead of phenomenalist; we build a world from language, which adds a social element. i think of rorty or gadamer as linguistic idealists. baudrillard in a way makes the obvious move, yet again: oh well there's no sense in holding on to this old distinction between simulacra and reality.

but here are some elements of the realist backlash: externalism in philosophy of mind a la andy clark or mark rowlands (well, or me), timothy williamson's epistemology and response to dummett, etc, bruno latour, speculative realism a la graham harman and levi bryant (and now many others), lee smolin arguing that time is real. 

i'm reading coming to our senses, by viki mccabe, who is a cognitive psychologist. here's the nut:

Because we coevolved with and adapted to a world of complex systems in which we participate, our senses evolved to parse the structural information that specifies the properties of those systems. . . . Unlike most books about cognition and perception that focus primarily on us - what we think and how our brains work - this book takes its lead from the world itself. . . it is not about us and our ideas; it is about the world and the structural information its complex systems convey.

 

this, i have to say, is obvious when you think about it for a moment: on any sort of naturalistic account of human beings, our perceptual apparatus has to respond to real features of the environment: that is what our sensory systems are for, and if we were imposing space and time on the universe, for example, the real universe would long ago have expunged us. we experience space and time and causation (to begin with) because they are real features of the world external to us. (this is why i'm also arguing against half-assed interpretations of relativity, etc). lord knows how philosophy got away with not asserting that, for centuries. i have a notion that enlightenment-and-after philosophy as a whole is profoundly anti-naturalistic and anti-scientific, is fighting a rear-guard action on behalf of Spirit, Mind, or whatnot.

 

in a certain way, baudrillard becomes ever-more true. but all of this virtual reality sets up a yearning for an authentic reality: philosophy is also an index of what we need. i started out as a realist in this sense, but got more intense as time went on. studying with rorty and stanley fish or contemplating their heroes like gadamer or reading baudrillard, you just could not help longing for a reality external to consciousness; the pomo moment was so enclosing, and it explicitly had a sense of dead end: like, this is where we ended up. debord shows the dead end politically, for example. i always thought the backlash had to come. i felt totally alone trying to create some kind of realism in rorty and fish's grad seminars in the 80s, but i did try. i didn't seem to have much luck making it come in the early 90s or whatever - i still felt to myself like a lone voice - but i think it was actually happening all around by then. the full brunt of all this will emerge in entanglements.

just when you need jean baudrillard

it really is too bad that jean baudrillard croaked before world war 17, pitting north korea against sony entertainment. a comedy assassination is taken as an 'act of war' and leads to an overwhelming virtual response. also, it's about time a government went to war with a corporation, or i also think that the us government is now at cyber war with north korea on behalf of the japanese corporate sector. pundits are debating whether the hacking is 'terrorism'. really the virtual and the actual have flowed or flown into one another, at least in all the rhetoric; the distinctions have broken down...in the media! there does seem to me to be an important difference between actual and virtual murder and war and terror, though, even though cgi is getting better and better. i think the whole thing is entertaining indeed. if i was sony or kim, i'd be figuring out how to monetize this bad boy in terms of an ongoing podcast or an unfolding assassination contest or nuclear holocaust conducted on buzzfeed. 

observers and meanings

i don't seem to be able to interest any physicists in squabbling, but let me give a primary example of the sort of thing i mean. so, one idea is that time is relative to an 'observer', specifically because of time dilation, in which time is measured differently by different observers depending on their movement relative to one another. now, this appears to be a quasi-kantian assertion: time is dependent on perception; it is a mental phenomenon or necessarily has a mental or subjective aspect.

but however, as far as i can see, the thought experiments that drive this have absolutely nothing to do with observation. two clocks travelling in different directions display the phenenomen. two plants would age at different rates relatively to each other, or two samples of the same element would undergo radioactive decay at apparently different rates. the thing is no more observer-dependent than radioactive decay in a single sample.

probably physicists must know this; there is no place for observers in the equations and so on. so from one angle it is just a terminological convenience. but i would think of it as a globally misleading terminological mistake. it freaks people into accepting an informally subjective universe as though that was a matter of course. obviously, i completely repudiate the sort of metaphysics that makes time relative to observers. but it rather irritates me that a whole century would assume something like that just because of an abuse of words. one asserts that time is observer-relative. perhaps 'what one really means' is true or something. but what one really said is false. words don't mean whatever you want them to mean.

what happens here is that you perform a thought-experiement: imagine that you were traveling east; now imagine you were traveling west; you're looking at a clock, etc. but you got confused between describing a thought experiment and descibing describing a thought experiment, so that you put the thinker you imagined yourself to be into the imagined world as though it were a necessary feature of that world. you imagined imagining an experiment, when you should have just been imagining an experiment. you made the consciousness which is necessary to perform any thought experiment necessary to the results of that experiment. i do think philosophy might have helped with some of this!

but this reading of relativity and also the subjectivist or phenomenalist reading of the uncertainty principle and so on, is also part of physics pr. it's so wild! only in its false form it's not that wild; it's just warmed-over german idealism. so try to state it in its true form.

oedipal realism

this paper by timothy williamson (one of the most eminent contemporary philosophers; i am struggling into his modal logic as metaphysics) is very fascinating. it's a history/memoir about the sneaky and then explicit revival of metaphysics within the analytic tradition, with characters including ayer, strawson, and kripke. in general there's a lot of interesting history of analytic philosophy emerging these days.

williamson writes this about his supervisor at oxford, the anti-realist philosopher of language michael dummett. "He was remarkably tolerant of the strident realism of my thesis, which effectively presupposed the futility of his life's work and pursued other issues from that starting point." that was around 1980. i might have written that sentence about my thesis with rorty, except that i probably at this point wouldn't put quite so much swashbuckle in it. i was a realist - the most extreme realist i could figure out how to be - but in 1988 i was not ready to really do rorty any damage. i am now. but he's not there anymore. but he too was remarkably tolerant, here of my combined anti-rortyanism and incompetence. i have this funny feeling that by 1980, when he was about 25, timothy williamson was fully as formidable as dummett, but i guess one wouldn't know without reading the thesis. i always thought those giant dummett books on frege etc went from awfully precise-seeming to awfully fuzzy-seeming right at the point where the anti-realist conclusions started flowing. 

but, all this time, philosophers of the generation after people like dummett and rorty have been yearning in a thousand ways for a return to the real world. i actually think this is intensified by the cyber-world and the screen world and virtual realities etc etc. in that atmosphere people yearn for a real physical environment. sometimes philosophy floats like this: as a negative image of the culture or an expression of its yearnings away from itself. 

So if Zombie Ayn Rand eats the brains of vampiric Ted Cruz...

For Crispin and Co....Merry Baby Jesus Birthday and stuff....

Speaking of which, here is the offical Crusader AXE position on CIA torture and such abominations. While I think it's a pretty good piece as these things go, as often happens with VetsToday, the comments are the best part. When a column gets that response, I feel like Sheldon Cooper, doomed to spend my life teaching evolution to fundamentalists in east Texas. On the other hand, they're pretty funny, if you don't mind feeling amazed at the stupidity of a hunk of the American population. Here's a personal favorite --

Since the massive Rhine meadows slaughter of 1.8 million Germans after WWII by your Rat Bastard leader Eisenhower torture has been a part of the US military efforts ever since! You rat bastard Yanks are far worse than the NAZIS ever were they were using these techniques for maybe ten to twelve years You Yankee Rat Bastards have been at it for 200 plus years and you Rat Bastards are proud of it! How long will you Rat Bastards remain in the sewers and latrine pits of humanity? 

Enjoy! good luck! and all that stuff...

 

 

against mason

for such an unprepossessing person, michael hayden's resume is really something, as is his testimony. four-star general and director of military intelligence. nsa director as the program of universal surveillance was established and of cia as, let's speculate, most of the records of the bush-era programs were cleaned up in anticipation of the transition. lord knows how he's contracted into the security state through the chertoff group, while like all such careers today, his makes it clear that the corporate boardroom, the surveillance state, and the torture chamber are located in the same compound. he is the primary spokesman for the pro-torture cabal currently invading the media in a years-in-the-making attempt to avoid trial for crimes against humanity.

what an academic might find disconcerting, though, is that he is also a distinguished professor at george mason university. this is the sort of problem i pointed to with regard to the gruber scandal. so perhaps your tendency there was to think there's nothing so wrong about the same professor helping write obamacare and being hired to sell it and also providing mit-stamped objective research showing that it would have good effects. but, if so, you might also be the sort of person who'd be disconcerted by a pattern of contributions to a university coupled with appointements that do not have even a vague academic justification. at many academic institutions, you are a distinguished professor just merely in virtue of raw power you wield, and also you have next to no academic duties. what a miserable excuse for a university george mason is, an object-lesson in academic boot-licking, like the philosophy department at moscow u under yuri andopov or something. but at any rate, in setting out the whole squishy totalitarian thang, i should have included the professoriate along with the corporation and the state. all forms of prestige and wealth gather around power, wait in line to shower it with accolades and cash.

intelligence coup, contd.

i do think it sort of eyeballs like john brennan is at the center: he is the fact that the torturers are still in charge. how in the name of god did he survive after it was revealed that the cia was hacking feinstein's committee to delete files etc? there has never been a clearer occasion on which someone should have been fired instantaneously, outright. if one really took the cia in that event to have been acting qua part of the executive, it is impeachable. and yet it faded in everyone's mind but feinstein's. she surely demanded brennan's resignation months ago and got nothing, so she's also pissed at obama, and may well have issued her report despite his attempts, at brennan's behest, to redact it in its entirety. but anyway, i don't think brennan could possibly have survived that if he actually served at the pleasure of the president, because a president is going to respond to the utterly justified outrage of a major figure in his own party. obviously, every day all day, you have to understand that john brennan has access to the last fifteen years of barack obama's communications. 

brennan is part of the group that mobilized immediately, that was already poised, to respond to the report. it is all one voice in many bodies: cheney, alberto gonzales (who you bring in only when you're down to your very last lawyer), hayden, jack rizzo, porter goss, mike rogers, and a swarm of staffers; brennan and all of them are saying the very same sentences. the republicans on the committee and the cia itself released complementary replies to the report instantaneously. now, does all that strike you as odd, when brennan serves at the pleasure of a president whose first act was to end the program and who calls it torture plainly, even as all these people still deny or evade even that? it's almost like brennan is part of another government, one consisting of supposedly former intelligence and homeland security and anti-terrorism officials now lodged here and there, maybe working for homeland security or whatever as consultants or in state-in-waiting thingtanks, and also the republican intelligence establishment in congress. it might not be entirely clear whether that group or the white house actually controls the intelligence services of the united states. and info is power, baby.

one thing that, for me, distinguishes american torture programs since 9.11 from any old torture by anyone here or there, is that i helped pay for them. that rather annoys me, i must say, though i draw some comfort from the fact that they obtained this money from me under coercion. i do appreciate that part of it.

giving it up for dianne

i have rarely seen a more formidable or angry or focused senator than dianne feinstein over the last two days. and i will say this: a straight-up totalitarian system could never have released that information. but the difference between sheer totalitarianism and something not that - under conditions of universal continual survellance, militarized police power, intelligence services as the basic centers of abusive power, and so on - is just the principled anger of someone like feinstein, who actually does have some power. also it depends, as i argued a few months ago, on such people being clean, on their having no skeletons whatsoever. if feinstein had a drug habit or had engaged in a series of affairs, john brennan would control her without effort.

it's been a pleasure

a wide-ranging debate has opened up about whether we gained actionable intelligence from torture. but that's only one way to defend torture, and if enthusiasts for other people's pain such as john brennan and charles krauthammer lose the argument on that ground, they should shift to this: torture isn't justified by its outcome; it is intrinsically satisfying. forced rectal feeding, for dick cheney or john brennan or mike rogers, needs no external justification: it is its own reward. all of these men are part of an oppressed and stigmatized sexual minority. what they were doing at black sites the world over was expressing their sexual identity, and that exonerates them because we are born with our sexual identities. god doesn't make junk, though he provides victims in abundance. the release of this report is a chance for all of us to confront our own sadophobia. the good part of 9/11 is that it opened up new dimensions of pleasure for michael hayden and george w. bush, pleasure that may well have outweighed the pain they were inflicting, leaving the world with a net increase in happiness. another good part is that it revealed who these people really are, and has been revealing it ever since. 

all decent americans must hope that the report - devastating though it is - doesn't lead to any actual changes in policy, for then it would become slightly more difficult to dangle michael hayden, alberto gonzales, john yoo, porter goss, and scooter libby from a pipe in the official us dungeon they themselves built in thailand, and use them as pinatas. admittedly, they're full of shit rather than candy. but sometimes the most amazing erotic experience for a top is to get flipped, and i would not want to deny various pundits and politicians and so on that opportunity. fortunately, according to justice department legal guidance - on which i always rely to enhance my own actions - no approval is needed to whisk these guys off and drop them off naked at isis hq with little bows on their heads. 'merry xmas, or whatever it is y'all celebrate over there. hope you enjoy these, because they aren't returnable. do send back video, though. cheers, the american people.'

it's over; nobody listens to techno

boy they are crucifying chris hughes on this tnr thing. i don't doubt that he is annoying, and you might understand that no writerly person can listen to phrases like 'vertically integrated' without wanting to poke someone in the eye. but i want to speculate that chris hughes may also be tired of the ideology that the staff represented, albeit ably considering what they had to work with. the new republic has had a number of phases of real controversy and wild debate, but i would say that over the last decade it has sunk into a basically uniform, unbelievably tired, american liberalism. this has gotten so repetitive; it so lacks any sort of imagination; it answers every problem with a bureaucracy; it basically hasn't changed since about 1932.

i hope someone like chris hughes quickly reached the point where he was just, 'am i reading that again in my own magazine? oh man that is some tired shit. why would anyone want to click on that?' the left has just got to re-think. there just can't be more more more paul krugman and hedrik hertzberg and michael tomasky, e.g.: miserable elitists and hyper-enthusiastic oppressors in the name of human liberation. there are so many things a left could be besides state state state, so many people it could encompass besides people who are simultaneously proponents of equality and extreme hierarchy, and who express their position with rigid self-righteousness and really unbelievable repetitiveness. it can't inspire anyone anymore to do anything.

and the new republic sank into the opinion-journalism mode of the moment. they present stuff as though it was propaganda: emphasizing all facts that help and none that don't, along with a constant rhetorical pounding of the same sentences and ideas. but however, their audience is 100% people who already agree with them, so whose responses are they trying to control? obviously rush limbaugh or glenn beck do the same: it's like they are desperate to persuade people who are already persuaded, desperate for the manipulated agreement of people who already agree. it's as though they are trying to utterly expunge their opponents in a debate, but their opponents aren't even there, and the only effect is to make their audience ever-more self-righteous and less self-reflective. on both sides, killing the other side is just a performance for themselves, designed so that everyone can feel superior together. why is that a worthwhile project? 

 

white tastelessness, the apotheosis

once i had a nightmare: bruce springsteen was appearing with u2. i woke to find it was real.

 

listen to them pound and bellow and extreme-emote through this tuneless yet operatic falderal. i'm looking and seriously wondering: can anybody want to listen to that? but i guess they do. myself, i'd rather be gnawed to death by pretentious gerbils, which is quite what that feels like. eventually, people will have a sudden awakening, like what am i listening to? geez, who am i, really? i could be listening to anything, and yet i chose to listen to that. perhaps i should strangle myself to death with my bare hands and abandon this veil of bilge. as i do so, i can take comfort in the fact that in this process my facial expressions and vocal stylings will come more and more to resemble the boss's in that performance. or perhaps someone who loves me will commit me involuntarity to a treatment facility for white tastelessness. at a minimum, if you can get through that video, you should engage in some withering aesthetic self-reflection.

authoritarian education

i was at a faculty meeting today discussing a possibly wide-ranging change in our curriculum. one theme was how in the world to deal with, or as one of my colleagues put it, 'treat' the kids who are coming out of k-12 education. everyone nodded as people said things like, "they just want to be told what to do, all the time in every respect". "they think education is just jumping through hoops". "they have no intrinsic interest in the material; they don't even know what that would be like.' it was not me, believe it or not, who described k-12 education in this period as 'profoundly authoritarian'. 'they regard teachers as mechanical information-delivery systems.' 'when you really look at the common core, it's all designed to take the last shreds of autonomy from teachers'. and so on. 

at one point, someone said, "well, i guess we all agree that these kids are being abused. the question is, what can we do to treat them or cure them of what they came in with, or of what our culture is now?"

you should really understand: this is a consensus in a faculty that is also more or less 100% left, people who to a person except me, might describe themselves as great proponents of public education, and who as a default position probably support most things the obama admin does. but look, we are all college teachers and there are certain things you just cannot see, every day. so what i wonder is: what in the world can be done about this? like universal surveillance - to which it is related in various ways - it flows on indifferently through democratic and republican adminstrations. well, both parties have deeply authoritarian basic orientations. and also, if you like, this approach is being driven by a particular economic vision, a particular version of technocratic capitalism, in which children are cogs. the personalities they are with some success attempting to manufacture cannot be and will not be citizens of a democracy, but of a squishy totalitarianism. 

bombing yourself

mike rogers - the nonstop apologist for war and domestic oppression - argues that releasing the torture report will lead to violence and death. of course what might be irritating to rogers is that such violence would be a response to learning the truth about something, namely the values and identity of people such as rogers. what really gets under rogers' skin isn't any old violence; it's violence that he himself helped make completely justifiable by facts. it's like his office got bombed by the reality of who mike rogers himself is. it's like the terrorist blowing himself up in mike rogers' office with a suicide vest is mike rogers' double, from a universe in which each of us has double, but where our doubles speak the truth. that kind of violence is peculiarly irritating to mike rogers.

plugging away from the margins

you know, my academic career has been a struggle. there are many factors in that, which i won't enumerate. but on the other hand i have tenure now and i've always had a job, even though i went into several mays not knowing if i'd be teaching in septembers. i cycled through disciplines; i've been a professor of communications, 'humanities and sciences', political science, 'art and art history' as well as philosophy. i've worked at vanderbilt, alabama, penn, millersville, penn state harrisburg, mica, and dickinson. honestly, all of this was just about trying to hold on. anyway, my kids had health insurance and shit. and what i'm proud of - and which has also partly been made possible by what i think of as my marginal career - is that i really did do whatever i wanted. i wrote exactly what i wanted, and i wrote it in exactly the ways i wanted to write it, and i honestly represented my own experience. i swore to do that after grad school, and i have. i have never not been paid a living wage to do what i wanted to do, including teach. so that is a lot lot to be grateful for. (on the other hand, i still owe 30k in student loans, and i'm 55). 

if i could lament one thing about philosophy now, it is that most of it is written in a kind of generic academic voice, and takes up pretty well-defined disciplinary questions of the moment. the good part of that is that it ends up constituting a kind of collective project, even within the constant disagreements that have to be central to the conception of philosophy (it is a discipline of agument, after all). but when i think back on what and who is worth reading in the history of philosophy, it is great big and extraordinarily distinctive voices. surely if you named ten historical philosophers off the top of your head, they would have that quality. even someone like aquinas is remaking as much as instantiating the philosophical/theological discourse he's in, and on the other hand is stunted by all the texts he's trying to venerate and emulate and the institutions that embed him. i think we've lost a lot of that boldness and distinctiveness, and indeed we literally lost it when we lost people like davidson, quine, rorty, danto, baudrillard. this is what i admire about zizek, for example, or latour: they still give that flavor. right now they seem like outliers, though i'm not saying there aren't a lot of intersting eccentrics here and there. you'll often find them in the provinces, or isolated from the big research-1 discourse.

anyway, i don't mean to assert that i am playing on that level; i sincerely try to turn that over; the reception is not in my power, nor can it be, nor should it be. i have tried to write according to the demands of the project and the subject-matter, not in order to be acclaimed. sometimes i read my own stuff as being there, sometimes i don't, and nothing is harder to do than to squarely or honestly or 'objectively' assess your own work. but i did always intend to end up there, at least in the sense of saying exactly what i do believe in as me-ey a way as i can (well, also to prove my positions in your face). i am not going to stop trying.

 

Correlating slaughter, comics and absinthe in the 21st Century

 

You know who Crusader AXE of the Lost Causes really misses right now? Hunter Thompson? Well, yeah. Molly Ivins. Well, yeah, of course. But another voice we no longer hear commenting is Warren Zevon. Waddy Wachtel, the great session guitarist and lead player was a close friend of Zevon and related troubled geniuses, and did an interview for a European rock magazine about Zevon's first album, saying that Jackson Browne who produced it, didn't know what the fuck he was doing. 

Wachtel got a call from Browne soon after that, and while wishing he hadn't said that, head Browne say that "You're exactly right. I had no clue how to handle him," followed by a offer to have him co-produce the second album, something about werewolves in London and something about lawyers.. The rest is history. 

Anyway, things get a bit strange at times. We do have equivalent voices, I suppose, but I still miss the old gang. You have to wonder how Ivins would have reacted to the Bengazi nonsense or how HST would have responded to the Democrats anti-Democratic campaign in 2014. Somehow, I think Zevon's still pretty relevant. 

Anyway, a Stephen Pastis cartoon, a botched raid in Yemen, and some aching from a memory in my right calf led me to think about this. I get to link absinthe, Dan George, war, Stephen Pastis in one article in a way that kind of make sense. As Steve Goodman wrote the perfect country and western song with "You Don't Have to Call Me," I have produced the perfect blog post for the 21st century. Sort of. Kinda. But this coda is needed...so here's the coda... 

it would be foolish to assume uncritically that luke somers was killed by his captors, as every msm outlet is doing. you'd think after getting burned twenty times you'd wise up and just keep formulating this line as the assertion of hagel or whomever it may be rather than the actual story. i don't know what happened, but this is a very usual sort of account making the whole thing compatible with american heroism, and often five years later it finally emerges it was friendly fire and the cascade of mistakes is revealed, just at the moment when almost no one cares any more.