At this early stage Heidegger holds that Dasein expriences its thrownness and groundlessness in anxiety. If it resolutely holds onto anxiety, that is, if it accepts its ontological limitations, it will give up rigid roles and identities and become sensitive to marginal practices from the past. So, for instance, resolute women will be able to be sensitive to gender practices left in our culture from pioneer days. As Heidegger puts it:
The resoluteness in which Dasein comes back to itself, discloses current factical possibilities of authentic existing, and discloses them in terms of the heritage which that resoluteness, as thrown, takes over. (p. 435) [p. 383]
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Dreyfus commenting on Foucault quote
For Foucault, postmodern power is not an instrument of exclusion, but a pervasive pressure towards ever greater inclusion. It does not serve to objectify, exclude, coerce or punish, but rather to order and enhance life. Power creates docile bodies and self-absorbed, deep subjects so as to produce ever greater welfare for all. The resulting practices embody what Foucault calls disciplinary bio-power.
"It is a power working to incite, reinforce, ... optimize, and organize the forces under it: a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them."
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault explains the way postmodern power is something entirely new. Unlike monarchical power, whose exercise was top-down, centralized, intermittent, highly visible, extravagant, and stable; postmodern power is bottom-up, diffuse, continuous, invisible, operating in the micro-practices, and constantly on the move colonizing new domains. In The History of Sexuality, Vol. I. Foucault adds:
"Power's condition of possibility ... must not be sought in the primary existence of a central point, in a unique source of sovereignty from which secondary and descendent forms would emanate ... Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere."
Just as for Heidegger the technological understanding of being, by treating everything as resources, levels being to pure ordering, and so gets rid of all onto-theology --the idea that some entity is the ground of everything -- so bio-power reveals the irrelevance of questions of the legitimacy of the state as the source of power. Foucault says:
"At bottom, despite the differences in epochs and objectives, the representation of power has remained under the spell of monarchy. In political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king. Hence the importance that the theory of power gives to the problem of right and violence, law and illegality, freedom and will, and especially the state and sovereignty."
That is, just as total mobilization cannot be understood by positing subjects and objects, so normalization works directly through new sorts of invisible, continuous practices of control Foucault calls micro-practices. The everyday person to person power relations whose coordination produces the style of any regime of power are, indeed, everywhere. But in earlier regimes of power they are not micro-practices. Only disciplinary power works meticulously by ordering every detail. So, while for Foucault all forms of power are bottom up and the understanding of power as monarchical misses this important fact, nonetheless bio-power is bottom-up in a new and dangerously totalizing way, so that understanding power on the model of the power of the king (the equivalent of onto-theology) covers up an important change in how our practices are working.
[We can schematize the above relations as follows:
Heidegger: ontological: mode of revealing: (Gestell) enframing
style: challenging forth
ontic: the practices are so structured as to make beings show us as optimizable and flexible standing reserves, i.e. things show up not as objects but as resources.
Foucault: ontological: dispositive(apparatus) : subjugation/objectification
style = discipline
ontic: things are organized by the apparatus (e.g. exams) so that people show up as docile bodies to be managed and enhanced.]
Heidegger and Foucault are clear, then, that what is uniquely oppressive in our current practices is not that they are illegitimate nor that they cause ecological devastation. According to Foucault legitimacy is a red herring; our current society becomes more oppressive as it becomes more protective of rights and more permissive, and productive. Heidegger, on his part, distinguishes the current problems of technology -- ecological destruction, urbanization, nuclear danger, etc. -- from the devastation that would result if technology solved all our problems.
What threatens man in his very nature is the ... view that man, by the peaceful release, transformation, storage, and channeling of the energies of physical nature, could render the human condition, man's being, tolerable for everybody and happy in all respects.
Their common critique of techno/bio-power does not, however, lead Heidegger or Foucault to oppose the use of technological devices, nor specific welfare practices. Heidegger is clear that it is the essence of technology -- the technological understanding of being -- not technology, that causes our distress. That the technological understanding of being can be disassociated from technological devices is clear if one looks at contemporary Japan where a traditional, non-technological understanding of being -- or, perhaps better, no single understanding of being at all, but a pluralistic understanding of multiple realities -- exists alongside the most advanced high-tech production and consumption.
When he was thinking of modes of resistance to the technological understanding of being, Heidegger came to think that there was an essential antagonism between a unified understanding of being and local worlds. Of course, he always realized that there would be an antagonism between the style set up by a cultural paradigm and things that could only be brought out in their ownness in a style different from the dominant cultural style. Such things would inevitably be dispersed to the margins of the culture. There, they will shine in contrast to the dominant style but will have to resist being considered irrelevant or even wicked. But if there is a single understanding of being even those things that come into their own in the dominant cultural style will be inhibited as things. Already in his "Thing" essay Heidegger goes out of his way to point out that, even though the original meaning of ‘thing’ in German is a gathering to discuss a matter of concern to the community, in the case of the thing thinging, the gathering in question must be self contained. The focal occasion must determine which community concerns are relevant rather than the reverse.
Given the way local worlds establish their own internal coherence that resists any imposition from outside there is bound to be a tension between the glorious cultural paradigm that establishes an understanding of being for a whole culture and the humble inconspicuous things. The shining of one would wash out the shining of the others. The tendency toward one unified world would impede the gathering of local worlds. Given this tension, Heidegger abandoned in a late seminar what he had considered up to then his crucial contribution to philosophy, the notion of a single understanding of being and its correlated notion of the ontological difference between being and beings. He remarks that "from the perspective of appropriation it becomes necessary to free thinking from the ontological difference." He continues, "From the perspective of appropriation, [letting-presence] shows itself as the relation of world and thing, a relation which could in a way be understood as the relation of being and beings. But then its peculiar quality would be lost." What presumably would be lost would be the self- enclosed local character of things. It follows that, as mortal disclosers of worlds in the plural, the only comprehensiveness we can hope to achieve is our openness to dwelling in many worlds and the capacity to move among them. Only such a capacity allows us to accept Heidegger’s criticism of technology and still have a genuinely positive relationship to technological it.
The moral seems to be that, when one is looking for marginal practices that could support resistance to the dominant regime of power, rather than thinking of resistance as a new regime that is dawning or a new god that can save us, one should think of the marginal as what is outside power. It is precisely not power but things and selves which will be what one studies. Thus in the last works of Heidegger and of Foucault the discussion of epochal understandings of being drops out for Heidegger and discussion of the structure of regimes of power seem to drop out for Foucault.
Beautiful!
"It is a power working to incite, reinforce, ... optimize, and organize the forces under it: a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them."
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault explains the way postmodern power is something entirely new. Unlike monarchical power, whose exercise was top-down, centralized, intermittent, highly visible, extravagant, and stable; postmodern power is bottom-up, diffuse, continuous, invisible, operating in the micro-practices, and constantly on the move colonizing new domains. In The History of Sexuality, Vol. I. Foucault adds:
"Power's condition of possibility ... must not be sought in the primary existence of a central point, in a unique source of sovereignty from which secondary and descendent forms would emanate ... Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere."
Just as for Heidegger the technological understanding of being, by treating everything as resources, levels being to pure ordering, and so gets rid of all onto-theology --the idea that some entity is the ground of everything -- so bio-power reveals the irrelevance of questions of the legitimacy of the state as the source of power. Foucault says:
"At bottom, despite the differences in epochs and objectives, the representation of power has remained under the spell of monarchy. In political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king. Hence the importance that the theory of power gives to the problem of right and violence, law and illegality, freedom and will, and especially the state and sovereignty."
That is, just as total mobilization cannot be understood by positing subjects and objects, so normalization works directly through new sorts of invisible, continuous practices of control Foucault calls micro-practices. The everyday person to person power relations whose coordination produces the style of any regime of power are, indeed, everywhere. But in earlier regimes of power they are not micro-practices. Only disciplinary power works meticulously by ordering every detail. So, while for Foucault all forms of power are bottom up and the understanding of power as monarchical misses this important fact, nonetheless bio-power is bottom-up in a new and dangerously totalizing way, so that understanding power on the model of the power of the king (the equivalent of onto-theology) covers up an important change in how our practices are working.
[We can schematize the above relations as follows:
Heidegger: ontological: mode of revealing: (Gestell) enframing
style: challenging forth
ontic: the practices are so structured as to make beings show us as optimizable and flexible standing reserves, i.e. things show up not as objects but as resources.
Foucault: ontological: dispositive(apparatus) : subjugation/objectification
style = discipline
ontic: things are organized by the apparatus (e.g. exams) so that people show up as docile bodies to be managed and enhanced.]
Heidegger and Foucault are clear, then, that what is uniquely oppressive in our current practices is not that they are illegitimate nor that they cause ecological devastation. According to Foucault legitimacy is a red herring; our current society becomes more oppressive as it becomes more protective of rights and more permissive, and productive. Heidegger, on his part, distinguishes the current problems of technology -- ecological destruction, urbanization, nuclear danger, etc. -- from the devastation that would result if technology solved all our problems.
What threatens man in his very nature is the ... view that man, by the peaceful release, transformation, storage, and channeling of the energies of physical nature, could render the human condition, man's being, tolerable for everybody and happy in all respects.
Their common critique of techno/bio-power does not, however, lead Heidegger or Foucault to oppose the use of technological devices, nor specific welfare practices. Heidegger is clear that it is the essence of technology -- the technological understanding of being -- not technology, that causes our distress. That the technological understanding of being can be disassociated from technological devices is clear if one looks at contemporary Japan where a traditional, non-technological understanding of being -- or, perhaps better, no single understanding of being at all, but a pluralistic understanding of multiple realities -- exists alongside the most advanced high-tech production and consumption.
When he was thinking of modes of resistance to the technological understanding of being, Heidegger came to think that there was an essential antagonism between a unified understanding of being and local worlds. Of course, he always realized that there would be an antagonism between the style set up by a cultural paradigm and things that could only be brought out in their ownness in a style different from the dominant cultural style. Such things would inevitably be dispersed to the margins of the culture. There, they will shine in contrast to the dominant style but will have to resist being considered irrelevant or even wicked. But if there is a single understanding of being even those things that come into their own in the dominant cultural style will be inhibited as things. Already in his "Thing" essay Heidegger goes out of his way to point out that, even though the original meaning of ‘thing’ in German is a gathering to discuss a matter of concern to the community, in the case of the thing thinging, the gathering in question must be self contained. The focal occasion must determine which community concerns are relevant rather than the reverse.
Given the way local worlds establish their own internal coherence that resists any imposition from outside there is bound to be a tension between the glorious cultural paradigm that establishes an understanding of being for a whole culture and the humble inconspicuous things. The shining of one would wash out the shining of the others. The tendency toward one unified world would impede the gathering of local worlds. Given this tension, Heidegger abandoned in a late seminar what he had considered up to then his crucial contribution to philosophy, the notion of a single understanding of being and its correlated notion of the ontological difference between being and beings. He remarks that "from the perspective of appropriation it becomes necessary to free thinking from the ontological difference." He continues, "From the perspective of appropriation, [letting-presence] shows itself as the relation of world and thing, a relation which could in a way be understood as the relation of being and beings. But then its peculiar quality would be lost." What presumably would be lost would be the self- enclosed local character of things. It follows that, as mortal disclosers of worlds in the plural, the only comprehensiveness we can hope to achieve is our openness to dwelling in many worlds and the capacity to move among them. Only such a capacity allows us to accept Heidegger’s criticism of technology and still have a genuinely positive relationship to technological it.
The moral seems to be that, when one is looking for marginal practices that could support resistance to the dominant regime of power, rather than thinking of resistance as a new regime that is dawning or a new god that can save us, one should think of the marginal as what is outside power. It is precisely not power but things and selves which will be what one studies. Thus in the last works of Heidegger and of Foucault the discussion of epochal understandings of being drops out for Heidegger and discussion of the structure of regimes of power seem to drop out for Foucault.
Beautiful!
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Learn the craft of thinking
Learn the craft of thinking, unswerving, yet erring.
To err is to wander. To swerve is to change direction quickly and violently. There is a difference between jumping in your car and speeding at 50 mph to accomplish the next chore on the rote, say, obtaining one's weekly groceries, and milling peacefully over to the corner store to buy a sack of potatoes. There is a similarity, perhaps, in that these are both things that have to be done, in some shape or form.
But what attitude is brought to the process? Forwards always, no abrupt changes in direction? No, not forwards only. We turn, we meander, we stop and pause. What's this store that just opened, I didn't see it before, what's inside? What's that person wearing, where did it come from? What are the clouds like today?
Was today a good day or a bad day?
In order to answer these questions one must err, one must wander.
But what is so bad about swerving? Indeed, what is swerving?
Swerving thought and a swerving automobile... both are swerving from a purposeful means of proceeding. You stop at a store in front of you because it is related to you. It is in your neighborhood, it is on the path you use everyday on the commute.
To swerve is to admit a severe error. To swerve is to lose control. To swerve is to follow a line of thought, you did not anticipate in the least before this moment.
It is done, however. It is done often even, I would say. But we could strive not to. For to do so takes away from the craft of thinking.
Learn the craft of thinking, unswerving, yet erring.
To err is to wander. To swerve is to change direction quickly and violently. There is a difference between jumping in your car and speeding at 50 mph to accomplish the next chore on the rote, say, obtaining one's weekly groceries, and milling peacefully over to the corner store to buy a sack of potatoes. There is a similarity, perhaps, in that these are both things that have to be done, in some shape or form.
But what attitude is brought to the process? Forwards always, no abrupt changes in direction? No, not forwards only. We turn, we meander, we stop and pause. What's this store that just opened, I didn't see it before, what's inside? What's that person wearing, where did it come from? What are the clouds like today?
Was today a good day or a bad day?
In order to answer these questions one must err, one must wander.
But what is so bad about swerving? Indeed, what is swerving?
Swerving thought and a swerving automobile... both are swerving from a purposeful means of proceeding. You stop at a store in front of you because it is related to you. It is in your neighborhood, it is on the path you use everyday on the commute.
To swerve is to admit a severe error. To swerve is to lose control. To swerve is to follow a line of thought, you did not anticipate in the least before this moment.
It is done, however. It is done often even, I would say. But we could strive not to. For to do so takes away from the craft of thinking.
Learn the craft of thinking, unswerving, yet erring.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
emergence
The word emergence has become more and more relevant, of late. People talk about the modern world again and again; the changes it has wrought continue to permeate the everyday. Starbucks coffee cups littering the streets and desktops. Asphalt blanketing the surface of the urban landscape. More cars, more public transportation, more plane routes, more, more, more production in general, expansion is the key to survival, those things which fail are simply absorbed into a constantly growing and shifting organism. Like life, always evolving, though unlike life, it is composed of many parts which are inorganic. And yet, they were produced by an organic substance. In a sense, the organic and inorganic parts form a whole when they interact, and thus to the eye which transcends viewing man from the perspective of himself in order to see the whole, this distinction becomes... unhelpful. Meaningless. Same thing.
An addendum to this, as it bothers me slightly. We talk about natural and artificial, but it is only a egotistical distinction. We are the products of our environment as much as anything else. The changed man has wrought on the world are fast, yes, but in the end everything must be reduced to what is natural.
In any case, perhaps it may prove a useful distinction in a less encompassing sense. So let us continue to use this pair of words, artificial-natural.
Returning to emergence. So we see a society which moves forwards, towards something, growing constantly, often violently, but such is all evolution. There are changes which are positive for the organism, which it embraces, and there are changes which are negative, which it strives to correct, and there are changes which seem to serve no purpose at all, or perhaps once served a purpose and no longer do, as does the appendix of man.
To use a biological metaphor, these are the precise interactions that one can label, mutualism, commensalism, and parasitism. The first is a cobeneficial interaction between two organisms, the second is an interaction where one species benefits from the relationship, and the third is one in which one species benefits and the other is harmed.
And yet these organisms themselves are a chaos of conflicting forces. Surely thousands of little processes occur every second inside a sparrow, some beneficial to its general well-being, many not, and yet as a whole the sparrow functions. And then, when we back off a few steps, we can see how the sparrow's interfacing with other organisms creates larger relationships.
We should not strive to understand the higher level in terms of the lower. It simply does not help much; for we have already come to understand the higher resolution intuitively. So what if a person lies 1% of the time, though the system is fallible, it still works, and so... we can generally speaking come to trust this person. So what if we don't understand every little process which brings to pass the birth of a ladybug, we still know that releasing a swarm of them over a crop will cause an aphid invasion some trouble.
Well there are problems with the above idea of course.
Self-sustainability is a word which comes to mind. The idea that there are systems which can preserve their processes longer than others. And yet what we forget when we talk about this is that there is a constant war going on for some limited resource. In order to realize self-sustainability, there must be a "giving-up" of autonomy. That is why the human organism, homo sapiens, is both a perfect example of self-sustainability and not. If you look at the organism itself in contrast to its environment, we can see that with its ability to project far into the future, and map the world and cosmos surrounding it, that it can plan for all sorts of contingencies. Indeed, this organism is perhaps the most self-sustainable organism as compared to any other in the world, from this perspective.
And yet from another perspective not at all. For we forget that by creating all of this "knowledge" the world has changed irreversibly. Indeed, the world and all of its biological components form a superorganism which has ran rampant. The production of knowledge has deeply affected it, for knowledge has far reaching implications. It has drained lakes, killed species, spawned wars, allowed for the unleashing of nuclear fission on the planet's surface...
Yes indeed, the very act of thought, has become more powerful than any mere physical process...
But to return to emergence. We are still in a process of evolution of course. We are in the process, to be more precise, of continually giving up our autonomy. Now there may be something intrinsic to the property of thought which may prevent a giving up of autonony to the extent that we find in the cells which make up a larger organism. But... on a whole, we are losing autonomy.
You could say something like, but wait! Today man has the ability to visit just about any country or island in the world to visit, and explore! Is that not more autonomous than what we had in say, the medieval ages?
Haha. That's funny. Think about the last place you visited. Think about the tourist industry, and all the lines forming like little self-governing processes as you wait to get onto the plane, or purchase a meal at a local restaurant, or waiting to get into a museum. Think of the beaches and all the hundreds of other people there.
You are not autonomous. You are taking part in a process which is much larger than you. Your choice of visiting this particular tourist destination was only made possible due to the channels of knowledge which have been constructed in society. Yes, the map of the world is a fairly objective instrument. It looks pretty much the same whether you look at it in the US or in China, except the spellings of each country seem slightly different. And yet, let me remind you, that this is not the world we are looking at. It is a representation of the world. And what you have in your mind is a representation of the world, too, after having learned how to navigate it. Because quite clearly you don't know your way around the world. Try navigating a foreign downtown city you've never been in before. I'm not saying find your way home, which is a simpler matter when one takes into account certain built-in systems of communication and self-localisation, but rather, try to find your way to the nearest supermarket, to the nearest government building, to the nearest...
Don't you see how lost we all are? We can see a map of the world, but all our representations depend on the workings of the system. We need to stop and ask for directions, consult a map.
It was similar before, I suppose, we used more primitive signs. Look for water by following the dry ravines downstream. Find a spring by following a river upstream. Etcetera. But the difference here is that all of these understandings of the world, these conceptualizations, are all bouncing off each other, feeding off each other, and producing in the end, a system which is incredibly dependent on its own mechanisms, streamlined and all.
The tourist depends on the tourist industry for finding his way around, for having a bed to sleep at night, for finding exotic food which he enjoys, and the tourist industry depends on the tourist for money so that it can also thrive.
But wait, you may say. That doesn't mean I'm giving up all my autonomy. We each are unique human beings. We can each choose an occupation and objective in life, we can pursue the arts, we can philosophize about things which don't even seem to matter!
Haha. Well there are some commensalistic and parasitic aspects to the system. The professional philosopher of say aesthetics may have a very mild impact upon the societal organism. But he is taking advantage of the system. He is what some may consider a parasite, feeding off its products, and enjoying a fulfilled existence himself without contributing in turn. These are not my perspectives, but they are perspectives held by certain parts of the system. Certain individuals think these things. And so you see what we have here is a conflict within the system.
But the philosophers are a part of their own system now. There are many of them, and they feed each other with their ideas, written and orally expressed, and they produce, produce, produce so much information, which richochets off other disciplines sometimes, and so we get a kind of interaction, which is insufficient to kill the entire organism clearly, and thus is not persuasively negative, at least not enough to justify exterminating the entire system such as it exists today. Indeed, perhaps it may eventually bring to pass a very positive effect. Who can tell?
The same goes for all processes, for all systems. Who can tell what time will bring? Who can look at the beginnings of history and expect all the stories which have come to pass since?
And yet, there are many things we can tell. We can look at the system as a whole. We can see the patterns falling into place, the people giving up their autonomies, so influenced by their cultures and environments. I can tell, when looking at a line in front of a museum, that the second person in line will follow the first person in line.
We are giving up our autonomy because we are creating a system which caters to more and more of us. We have to integrate ourselves into the system in order to succeed; we have to be mutualistic to demonstrate our usefulness.
And yet, funnily enough, there are also just some of us who only want to sit in the corner and philosophize.
An addendum to this, as it bothers me slightly. We talk about natural and artificial, but it is only a egotistical distinction. We are the products of our environment as much as anything else. The changed man has wrought on the world are fast, yes, but in the end everything must be reduced to what is natural.
In any case, perhaps it may prove a useful distinction in a less encompassing sense. So let us continue to use this pair of words, artificial-natural.
Returning to emergence. So we see a society which moves forwards, towards something, growing constantly, often violently, but such is all evolution. There are changes which are positive for the organism, which it embraces, and there are changes which are negative, which it strives to correct, and there are changes which seem to serve no purpose at all, or perhaps once served a purpose and no longer do, as does the appendix of man.
To use a biological metaphor, these are the precise interactions that one can label, mutualism, commensalism, and parasitism. The first is a cobeneficial interaction between two organisms, the second is an interaction where one species benefits from the relationship, and the third is one in which one species benefits and the other is harmed.
And yet these organisms themselves are a chaos of conflicting forces. Surely thousands of little processes occur every second inside a sparrow, some beneficial to its general well-being, many not, and yet as a whole the sparrow functions. And then, when we back off a few steps, we can see how the sparrow's interfacing with other organisms creates larger relationships.
We should not strive to understand the higher level in terms of the lower. It simply does not help much; for we have already come to understand the higher resolution intuitively. So what if a person lies 1% of the time, though the system is fallible, it still works, and so... we can generally speaking come to trust this person. So what if we don't understand every little process which brings to pass the birth of a ladybug, we still know that releasing a swarm of them over a crop will cause an aphid invasion some trouble.
Well there are problems with the above idea of course.
Self-sustainability is a word which comes to mind. The idea that there are systems which can preserve their processes longer than others. And yet what we forget when we talk about this is that there is a constant war going on for some limited resource. In order to realize self-sustainability, there must be a "giving-up" of autonomy. That is why the human organism, homo sapiens, is both a perfect example of self-sustainability and not. If you look at the organism itself in contrast to its environment, we can see that with its ability to project far into the future, and map the world and cosmos surrounding it, that it can plan for all sorts of contingencies. Indeed, this organism is perhaps the most self-sustainable organism as compared to any other in the world, from this perspective.
And yet from another perspective not at all. For we forget that by creating all of this "knowledge" the world has changed irreversibly. Indeed, the world and all of its biological components form a superorganism which has ran rampant. The production of knowledge has deeply affected it, for knowledge has far reaching implications. It has drained lakes, killed species, spawned wars, allowed for the unleashing of nuclear fission on the planet's surface...
Yes indeed, the very act of thought, has become more powerful than any mere physical process...
But to return to emergence. We are still in a process of evolution of course. We are in the process, to be more precise, of continually giving up our autonomy. Now there may be something intrinsic to the property of thought which may prevent a giving up of autonony to the extent that we find in the cells which make up a larger organism. But... on a whole, we are losing autonomy.
You could say something like, but wait! Today man has the ability to visit just about any country or island in the world to visit, and explore! Is that not more autonomous than what we had in say, the medieval ages?
Haha. That's funny. Think about the last place you visited. Think about the tourist industry, and all the lines forming like little self-governing processes as you wait to get onto the plane, or purchase a meal at a local restaurant, or waiting to get into a museum. Think of the beaches and all the hundreds of other people there.
You are not autonomous. You are taking part in a process which is much larger than you. Your choice of visiting this particular tourist destination was only made possible due to the channels of knowledge which have been constructed in society. Yes, the map of the world is a fairly objective instrument. It looks pretty much the same whether you look at it in the US or in China, except the spellings of each country seem slightly different. And yet, let me remind you, that this is not the world we are looking at. It is a representation of the world. And what you have in your mind is a representation of the world, too, after having learned how to navigate it. Because quite clearly you don't know your way around the world. Try navigating a foreign downtown city you've never been in before. I'm not saying find your way home, which is a simpler matter when one takes into account certain built-in systems of communication and self-localisation, but rather, try to find your way to the nearest supermarket, to the nearest government building, to the nearest...
Don't you see how lost we all are? We can see a map of the world, but all our representations depend on the workings of the system. We need to stop and ask for directions, consult a map.
It was similar before, I suppose, we used more primitive signs. Look for water by following the dry ravines downstream. Find a spring by following a river upstream. Etcetera. But the difference here is that all of these understandings of the world, these conceptualizations, are all bouncing off each other, feeding off each other, and producing in the end, a system which is incredibly dependent on its own mechanisms, streamlined and all.
The tourist depends on the tourist industry for finding his way around, for having a bed to sleep at night, for finding exotic food which he enjoys, and the tourist industry depends on the tourist for money so that it can also thrive.
But wait, you may say. That doesn't mean I'm giving up all my autonomy. We each are unique human beings. We can each choose an occupation and objective in life, we can pursue the arts, we can philosophize about things which don't even seem to matter!
Haha. Well there are some commensalistic and parasitic aspects to the system. The professional philosopher of say aesthetics may have a very mild impact upon the societal organism. But he is taking advantage of the system. He is what some may consider a parasite, feeding off its products, and enjoying a fulfilled existence himself without contributing in turn. These are not my perspectives, but they are perspectives held by certain parts of the system. Certain individuals think these things. And so you see what we have here is a conflict within the system.
But the philosophers are a part of their own system now. There are many of them, and they feed each other with their ideas, written and orally expressed, and they produce, produce, produce so much information, which richochets off other disciplines sometimes, and so we get a kind of interaction, which is insufficient to kill the entire organism clearly, and thus is not persuasively negative, at least not enough to justify exterminating the entire system such as it exists today. Indeed, perhaps it may eventually bring to pass a very positive effect. Who can tell?
The same goes for all processes, for all systems. Who can tell what time will bring? Who can look at the beginnings of history and expect all the stories which have come to pass since?
And yet, there are many things we can tell. We can look at the system as a whole. We can see the patterns falling into place, the people giving up their autonomies, so influenced by their cultures and environments. I can tell, when looking at a line in front of a museum, that the second person in line will follow the first person in line.
We are giving up our autonomy because we are creating a system which caters to more and more of us. We have to integrate ourselves into the system in order to succeed; we have to be mutualistic to demonstrate our usefulness.
And yet, funnily enough, there are also just some of us who only want to sit in the corner and philosophize.
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
What is a fractal?
A fractal is a recursive element: "fractals can be any type of infinitely scaled and repeated pattern." (http://rsb.info.nih.gov/ij/plugins/fraclac/FLHelp/Fractals.htm)
Also useful for this discussion are the terms "nonlinear" and "stochastic."
"a nonlinear system is any problem where the variable(s) to be solved for cannot be written as a linear combination of independent components"
"A stochastic process is one whose behavior is non-deterministic in that a state's next state is determined both by the process's predictable actions and by a random element. Stochastic crafts are complex systems whose practitioners, even if complete experts, acknowledge that outcomes result from both known and unknown causes. Classical examples of this are medicine: a doctor can administer the same treatment to multiple patients suffering from the same symptoms, however, the patients may not all react to the treatment the same way. This makes medicine a stochastic process.[1] Additional examples are warfare, meteorology and rhetoric, where success and failure are difficult enough to predict that explicit allowances are made for uncertainty."
Why are fractals important?
Fractals provide a way of successfully mapping extremely complex systems. Non
Also useful for this discussion are the terms "nonlinear" and "stochastic."
"a nonlinear system is any problem where the variable(s) to be solved for cannot be written as a linear combination of independent components"
"A stochastic process is one whose behavior is non-deterministic in that a state's next state is determined both by the process's predictable actions and by a random element. Stochastic crafts are complex systems whose practitioners, even if complete experts, acknowledge that outcomes result from both known and unknown causes. Classical examples of this are medicine: a doctor can administer the same treatment to multiple patients suffering from the same symptoms, however, the patients may not all react to the treatment the same way. This makes medicine a stochastic process.[1] Additional examples are warfare, meteorology and rhetoric, where success and failure are difficult enough to predict that explicit allowances are made for uncertainty."
Why are fractals important?
Fractals provide a way of successfully mapping extremely complex systems. Non
Saturday, October 4, 2008
Schopenhauer's World as Will and Presentation
I was going through Schopenhauer and am about halfway through book 2 of this thing. It is hard to follow at times. The first book mainly concerns reason, and his detailed explanation with regards to how reasons doesn't really explain things at all, and the second book thus far introduces will as the only explanation that we should ever really need.
That summary doesn't really do justice to what is actually a very deft and verbose affair-- a lot of the points he makes are convincing and you find yourself wanting to follow the entire arch of the argument better.
The translator did a decent job but I wish I had a professor to help me walk through it.
That's all for now.
That summary doesn't really do justice to what is actually a very deft and verbose affair-- a lot of the points he makes are convincing and you find yourself wanting to follow the entire arch of the argument better.
The translator did a decent job but I wish I had a professor to help me walk through it.
That's all for now.
Friday, August 29, 2008
Spatial Relations
What makes a distance a distance?
I mean, how do we know it takes, say, 2 miles to get to school, or 15 miles to get to work?
One can "feel" that some distances are greater than others. But some days, don't some distances "feel" shorter even though one's traveled them X number of times already?
One can "see" that one thing is further away than another. But this is merely a matter of immediate comparison which can change the moment you change your position.
One can "measure" distance by using instruments. The question remains: Does the machine correlate with how we "feel," or do we adjust our feelings to correlate to the measured distances?
Take for example, a 25 mile bike ride down the beach, in contrast to a 20 mile bike ride through hot, humid, industrial downtown.
Without an instrument to measure distances, would not these two distances, perhaps, via personal judgment, be swapped?
Also, we should remember that there is more than one way to get to the same point. The distance conventionally used to label two points' distance apart is not the shortest distance between them, for such a distance involves the curvature of the earth.
I mean, how do we know it takes, say, 2 miles to get to school, or 15 miles to get to work?
One can "feel" that some distances are greater than others. But some days, don't some distances "feel" shorter even though one's traveled them X number of times already?
One can "see" that one thing is further away than another. But this is merely a matter of immediate comparison which can change the moment you change your position.
One can "measure" distance by using instruments. The question remains: Does the machine correlate with how we "feel," or do we adjust our feelings to correlate to the measured distances?
Take for example, a 25 mile bike ride down the beach, in contrast to a 20 mile bike ride through hot, humid, industrial downtown.
Without an instrument to measure distances, would not these two distances, perhaps, via personal judgment, be swapped?
Also, we should remember that there is more than one way to get to the same point. The distance conventionally used to label two points' distance apart is not the shortest distance between them, for such a distance involves the curvature of the earth.
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