bootslack

This is probably the best expansion of the idea “What is, is.” I have ever read. While that sentence has the appearance of a tautology, only an idiot would mistake it for one. (There are a lot of people who pretend to be idiots to force linguistically narrow agendas — I am being aggressive up front to avert any disingenuous conversations about the polysemic nature of language.) The word “is” is obviously being used in two different senses — and some philosophy is probably necessary to understand that there is a question at all, or what question is being answered. Walter Benjamin approaches the idea by proposing expanding a metaphorical use of the word “life” to be the principal definition of the word. He is not mistaking a definition, he is proposing a shift of a definition — and it is not a new one, it is one you are already used to, you just are not used to it as a primary definition.

Here we go:

The idea of life and afterlife in works of art should be regarded with an entirely un-metaphorical objectivity. Even in times of narrowly prejudiced thought there was an inkling that life was not limited to organic corporeality. But it cannot be a matter of extending its dominion under the feeble scepter of the soul, as Fechner tired to do, or, conversely, of basing its definition on the even less conclusive factors of animality, such as sensation, which characterize life only occasionally. The concept of life is given its due only if everything that has a history of its own, and is not merely the setting for history, is credited with life. In the final analysis, the range of life must be determined by history rather than by nature, least of all by such tenuous factors as sensation and soul. The philosopher’s task consists in comprehending all of natural life though the more encompassing life of history.

(from: The Task of the Translator)

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Since we are having this conversation after the New Age movement I need to add that he is not talking about everything being conscious. This is not spiritualism — he is talking about taking the word life — as it is used in the metaphor “it developed a life of it’s own” — and making that sense of the word the primary definition, instead of basing the word on the subjective experience of being an animal, or even the objective definitions of biology.

This wonderful (and deliciously long) essay on American political trends was written about the 2004 election, but it is just in time to reflect on the interesting trends showing up for the 2008 election. Most notable is the jettisoning of the religious right from presidential politics. When the Republicans tossed out their “lead from the Good Book” candidates they showed themselves to be more progressive then the Democrats — who are still trying to cobble together a world-view based on isolationism, protectionism and Marxism. However you break it down, David Brin shows us that the categories most of us use to understand the world are a little tired around the edges.

You might also want to check out his proposal for a Modernist Party. I like the idea and direction to this more than some of the specific planks — but I find the concept to be exiting.

Differences of opinion in America are frequently cast and defended as being the result of the shared self-interest of different groups. The casual cynicism of the intellectual marketplace claims that all questions come down to power — with political questions decided by votes and boycotts and other forms of soft coercion. I read recently (although I forget where) an analysis of the Democratic presidential primary as being a question of weather the average American is more unwilling to be seen as misogynist or as racist. Of course this kind of cynicism isn’t new — Plato rails against it 2600 years ago, and the Roman leadership refers to it while it is trying to figure out what to do about Jesus. Not “What are you saying?” but “What do you want?” Susan Jacoby peeks at this issue — which really deserves more attention than she gives it — and really deserves to be studied with the full weight of experimental sociology and psychology.

The range of people who “one cannot really talk to” is vast. What surprises me is how consistent the defense mechanisms against argument are. I argue (almost by rote any more) against the position of global anthropogenic climate change. What astonishes me is not that I am unable to convince others — but that people who argue against me do not seem to differentiate between strong and weak arguments. An article will appear in the paper talking about a butterfly habitat which has changed in recent months and the question will be raised as to if this is the result of global warming. There will be no actual evidence in the article, and the scope of the butterflies habitat will be to small to generalize off of. But an otherwise rational person will argue that point (the point of the article being evidence, which it never even claimed to be) with the same degree of ferocity as they will argue the interpretation of ice-core data — which actually could be evidence for their position.

What is even more disturbing is that, despite the fact that I say over and over again that I am arguing more about how arguments are made, and what constitutes good evidence, the people who I am arguing with seem to be unable to hear that. What this means to me is that the foundation skills to determine what is and is not a good argument are totally missing in public debate. People do not understand the difference between evidence, argument and opinion. And I do think it comes down to a lack of understanding — a few people are proud to claim they live in a world without values and ideas and proclaim such things to be “just words” — but like the poor they have always been with us. What concerns me more are the people who have been shut out of public debate because, at some point in time, they sought to learn rhetoric, and instead were taught sophistry.

Assumptions about the 60s and 70s — simplistic and wrong — dominate the contemporary political dialog of the left and the right. Vince Carducci presents a broader read of the 70s than I am used to seeing. While I like the direction this is going in — I would like to see more numbers and fewer cliches — he is trading on a less common set of cliches than the left and right trade on when they are whipping the 70s, but it would certainly be more interesting to try to put some of his more or less smug asides into operational economic terms and see what data is around to support them.

I was sick for almost two weeks, and I have discovered a funny thing — I have only a cursory relationship with the person who actually got sick. I’m living in his room — I have inherited a series of problems (he was in the process of getting his drivers license and such), I have some phone numbers — and various biographical facts about the people who will answer the phone if I call — and a job. All in all it fits together — I’m a role playing character on a reasonable adventure for my type and skill. What I don’t have is any firm sense of identity with this person. I know what he was doing — so it is no real trick for me to pick up where he left off — but I’m not at all sure who he was — and I don’t think that I agree at all with what he thought was important.

Of course it doesn’t matter - because since I am occupying the place where he was — he is obviously dead — there is no other place for him to be.

Since he is dead — I find myself in an interesting ethical conundrum — what do I owe his memory? I have inherited some thousands of pages of notes — do I owe it to him to read those notes and try and figure out what he was doing? Or should I just toss them and start from scratch? Should I keep the books that he thought were interesting on my shelves? Or should I displace them as I discover my own taste? I don’t particularly like how he dressed — but all his clothes fit me — and he doesn’t really have very much money. In fact — he doesn’t appear to have much of anything, which makes me wonder — do I owe him anything at all?

If I just allowed his passing to go unremarked, and quietly slipped into his place (as I evidently have done physically) would anyone notice?

From one angle of analysis it seems obvious that films provide more — when an actor speaks they are a specific person, their face can be read for non-verbal content, the cinematography and setting reflect choices — all of that is available to the eye. It seems like there is more information available to the viewer — however most of that information is arbitrary, and most viewers expect that information to be arbitrary.

For example — a specific scene in some detective film could be described detail by detail, and the literal description might run on for days — but if a writer were to consider the same scene from the point of view of story telling — the unusually shaped knot on the hero’s right shoe might get left out.

Ah! Says the film critic — but that carries the key to solving the whole mystery of the film! Well — if it did, in fact, then it would be included in the writers presentation — because writing is a form of abstraction. Good writing can be defined as the economical presentation of everything you need and absolutely nothing else. Even in the most generous of realistic novels, every word is chosen. It is possible to make a film (Peter Greenaway comes close) where every square inch of screen real estate communicates — but even when you do, it does not communicate in the same way as a book.

Peter Greenaway complains that film has been needlessly wed to the book. We can see this when we compare books and film as if they are trying to do the same thing (which from a marketing perspective they might in fact be trying to do — but from an artistic perspective such an argument is ridiculous.) I think that a film compares to a book in the same way that it compares to a meal, or architecture, or music. Which, in a certain sense is not at all, and in a certain sense is only in very broad aesthetic terms. A meal can be rich, and foreign. A symphony can be loud and strident. But a meal does not give you more information about macaroni, despite the fact that every individual macaroni on the dish is actually passing into your body, than a book about macaroni. In comparing books and film, likewise, different modalities of experience and understanding are getting compressed in metaphors about modalities of experience generally.

Seeing a film is absolutely nothing like reading a book — nothing whatsoever.

A film can be made that treats the subject matter of a book — but it cannot present the content of a book. An image is not an abstraction any more than it is a note. A film can be discussed in a book — a book can be made of all of the words which are used in a film, and even descriptions of the action. But in the end this is no more a reconstruction than if you were to make a symphony based on a meal, and were to include all of the sounds made in the preparation and consumption of the meal. It would be an interesting idea — but it would not be the meal.

We have gotten used to this additional constraint — the constraint of the book on film — but it is a convention. Like the habit of describing time metaphorically in terms of space, we are so used to the substitution that we instinctively think of it as real, which it absolutely is not.

But then people are also prone to confuse reading with reading. Real reading is not easy. It’s like reading continuously as if you were reading for a comprehension test. Very subtle details from one paragraph can be picked up 3 paragraphs later and mirrored, or reversed — a sensitive or trained reader will pick that up — they will even be watching for it. Most people do not read with that level of care — even most people who can read with care typically do not unless they have been cued that a specific writer is worthy of their attention. When reading politics people read, usually, indications and sound bites — they look for an indication that the author is conservative or liberal. And then (knowing ahead of time weather to be shocked or amused) they look for the simple turn on the news of the day.

Then of course there are the genera writers — romance, sci-fi, crime etc. who also write indications — or basically — cliches.

I think that my friend Stefan hit it when he identified what defines the expectation of the average web reader/viewer as being that they are browsing from work, and are looking for something amusing to fill 5 minutes of their time. When I look at the different kinds of “messages” that I get during a day — weather IM, or emails, or comments on different kinds of web sites — all of it is quick-hit. We aren’t looking for any kind of depth. If I write a long response, or use very much nuance or subtlety it isn’t, for the most part, appreciated or even noticed. If I ask a whole string of questions, only one or two will be answered.

So it is this difference of writing from writing which is the basis of my dis-satisfaction with the web, more than the reliance on video imagery. Although I would like to say that the oft repeated cliche that visual images are used to convey a higher depth of information is patently false. Most of the images bouncing around the web are merely clever, or sexy, or cute — just as there is good writing and bad writing, there are rich and poor images, and the web is awash in very shallow imagery for the most part.

In short, I would say that what defines the web right now is not the perceptual psychology of any of the modalities of information presentation which are used on it, as much as the expectations of it’s audience — which are on the whole, pretty low.

She was everything to him.
He decided, if he could love purely enough
he could keep her.
He was wrong about the second part
and finally, after a time
accepting that he had been wrong at all
he realized he may have been mistaken about the first part as well.

I’m going to start with my second point, and I am not really going to tie the points together. I was not intending to post anything today — but this idea is buzzing around in my head — so I’m just going to stub it and maybe come back to it later. On the other hand — it might not need to be developed — my second idea: the best web site on the entire web is the TED lectures archive. With the possible exception of Rives. I would take that one site over the whole rest of the web — no kidding.

There is nothing you have to do this upcoming weekend that would serve you better than browsing this site — if you have never gone through the lists do so now.

So that is what I feel a good website is all about — that site does for me the best of what the web can do. Those lectures, altogether, never would have ended up on TV — most people are too stupid to understand how important they are. You won’t see those topics in standard headlines — but now they are available to stream everywhere all the time forever — and a hundred more will get uploaded this year. The small number of people around the world who would get inspired to go create even more great stuff like that have those lectures on tap, in their bed-rooms, like a constant spigot of good strong coffee.

I am showing my colors here — I am completely elitist. I am not (even in my high-self-regarding imagination) a member of that elite — but I do believe that the web provides a channel of communication for the elite — by which I just mean the people who actually think up and create all the cool stuff the rest of us use, to inspire each other with. Personally, I have a Myspace account. I love Myspace — at the end of the century, Myspace will have contributed absolutely nothing to the forward movement of humanity — it is a gigantic communal act of masturbation. Facebook is masturbation for social climbers — you’ll notice all the better people have Facebook accounts. I hope they climb far far above where I can hear them speaking any more… when I said I was an elitist, I meant the real elite.

You know how everyone was all exited that maybe child-molesters were pooling their resources on the internet, and organizing into some kind of mega-underground child-terror league? Yea — they aren’t that high functioning, and when the lurk in chat rooms it just makes them easier to catch — but the geniuses in our society have been using the internet for exactly that purpose since before it was called the internet. (Organizing and communication, not predation.)

So — that is good interwebs. What is good writing?

I’m going to throw out some places that served as the basis for my own taste in writing, I would love to hear from other folks:

The New Yorker
Harper’s
The Paris Review (one of a vanishingly small number of magazines which also carries consistently good poetry)
Vanity Fair

Any other suggestions? That pretty much does it for me. I really wish I could add Scientific American to the list — but it has been such a cheap piece of trash for the last 20 years that I have almost forgotten how good it was in the 1980s, when it was one of the first magazines I read on a regular basis. They used to do these long, elaborate articles, every graphic was communicative, every comment was apt. You really should pick up a copy from their glory days — check out your local library — I would love to see a magazine like that again.

I’ve had a miserable flu for a week and I have some wonderful things about fever dreams to share, but sitting down at my desk is making me dizzy and ill, so I think I am just going to go back to bed. Sorry.

I did want to share a recent discovery (sans comment) in light of my complaint about online writing. I found a fun blog — it is neither the New Yorker nor the Paris Review — but it is awfully good and is almost what I was looking for.

And I also want to share a lovely musical discovery.

But only for people who are curious enough to follow links.

I’ll be back when my brain heals a bit.

And in saying this I am not advocating a return to medievalist metaphysics, or leaving a door open so that I can whip out my own bizarre theories and try to convert you

But it needs to be said: Things are not so straightforward as all of the rationalists are walking around pretending.

Things look very clear cut in the text books — but that is not science, that is dogma — and dogma always has the fat trimmed off. If you have ever actually engaged in scientific experimentation then what I am saying now will be immediately obvious to you — there is no such thing as a clean experiment.

It almost never works out in practice like it does in the first year physics book — with all the sig figs being where they are supposed to be, and the law being obvious and apparent. Where it does — like in the Millikan Oil Drop experiment (which is an astoundingly beautiful experiment) the environment has been highly contrived to produce the desired results. That doesn’t at all mean that the result is invalid — but it does mean that narrative has a central place in the process.

Life as it comes to us is messy — and anyone who tells you that science does not posses narrative is lying. As soon as you construct an experiment — and I don’t mean quantum interaction with consciousness or any foofy shit like that — just a simple pendulum experiment, you are no longer observing — you are creating a situation which does not exist by itself in nature. You are imposing a narrative — and the order of your results partially reflects order in nature, and partially the order of the experiment.

Science education does us a great dis-service when it presents the ideas of inertia and force and acceleration as if they are self evident and clear. People argued about those concepts for almost 2000 years before getting a satisfactory formal representation. When you go and memorize that, and then hold yourself up like you thought of it yourself you are just being a buffoon. And it is assuredly not the case that one can tell from the outset, from a priori reasoning how much narrative, and what the narrative should be that will make sense of the columns of numbers. Or even which columns you should use.

Study your science history — it doesn’t matter what field you are looking into — there are 25 blind alleys to every well traveled thoroughfare that is used today, and a lot of what we use today is going to end up getting tossed out.

George Santayana says that we are born “in play” — life is already going when we get here — and it is important to remember that we will simply never get back to the beginning to see how it all came together. What we have is a whole mess of instincts, feelings, ideas, and words — and we are surrounded by complex and constantly changing phenomena that have deep symmetrical patterns — some of which appear to be more objective and some of which appear to be more subjective.

We take for granted that the life of a plant can be reduced to it’s chemistry — and I for one believe that there are good reasons to think this is the case. But it is important to acknowledge that you yourself have never actually seen that this is the case. You have never taken a plant apart on the molecular level, and put it back together, and observed the transition from a non-living set of chemical equations to a biological organism. You can take reductionism on faith, or you can accept it by way of an inductive argument, but you don’t get it through deduction, and you don’t get it through empiricism. You are accepting it based on the preponderance of the evidence, and a couple of value judgments besides. You are accepting a whole collection of abstractions, which you have likewise constructed partly from data, and partly from narrative. It all pulls together and makes a pretty coherent picture — which happens to leave out most of reality, and is filled with errors.

If you forget this, especially when you are arguing for a reason based life, then you fall into the same trap as every other faith on the planet — of assuming greater support for your own position than is actually warranted. The only reason to do that is to buoy up your ego. Put it aside man — you aren’t that important — the plant is important. AND YOU DON’T REALLY KNOW WHAT THE PLANT IS.

And that is OK — lets look together…