A Cacophony of Birds

Eschatoledge

ac0b — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 01:17:25 +0000

It’s been quite some time now since metaphysics and epistemology parted ways. The status quo for contemporary philosophy is to assume this division, but given my particular intellectual influences I fail to see what further benefits can be drawn from maintaining it. In fact, I see it as more likely to hamper our endeavors, particularly scientific ones. The scientific drive is to know what things are, which is an inextricable mush of things being and the knowledge of them.

But ‘knowing what things are’ is hampered by the slight complication of being impossible (we are not all the Queen of Hearts). At least under what I think to be the first and most immediate imagining of the concept. This complication arises from the natural indeterminacy of most human events. We want to speak of many things as having some sort of ‘being’: cars, the weather, baseball games, trees, asphalt, movies, etc… But often these experiences cannot be spoken of determinately until they have reached a conclusion; until their being has to a large degree departed. Or better put, the manner of speaking of these events changes in a dramatic fashion upon their completion.

After all, in the middle of a movie, what you are doing is watching a movie. But afterwards, you have watched a good movie or a bad movie. A movie with sufficient character development or a movie from which something significant was lacking. A movie that led you on into a surprising twist or a movie that only led you on. Watching a movie is easy; forming any sort of judgment about the experience (in the middle of it) either is incomplete or makes some significant assumption about the future, most relevantly about how you expect the experience to end.

If this is true, there are two immediate benefits that I think can be drawn from it. In the first place, keeping the notion firmly in mind could help science be more consciously speculative about its world. I think the field as a whole is very strongly speculative (in an imaginative sense), but that freedom of thought is hampered by the ubiquitous notions of determinant hidden truths, just waiting to be found. But it is perhaps an oddity in which there is a way the world is. More often it is only ever becoming.

Secondly, in affairs involving men it would imply that a robust imagination for the future is indispensible. If you haven’t a good idea of where you’re going, it follows that you are, simply put, lost.

After all, when Kant spent his ten lost years manufacturing the book-shaped wedge that would finally drive metaphysics and epistemology apart, he was engaged in the process of changing the world. But had the Western imagination not caught hold of his ideas, this would not have been what he was doing at all. What he would have chiefly been doing, despite his claims to the contrary, was wasting his time.

Literaffiti

ac0b — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 03:30:42 +0000

There has been some complaint (from a few isolated voices), that poetry is being a bit short-changed by its makers. They assert that the ranks of academia have folded on themselves in an unseemly manner, forming a community in which poetry is being written for the sake of poets. Of course, there is nothing objectionable about poets enjoying eachother’s work (as they are wont to do, or not to do), but I am concerned that poetry is becoming inaccessible and, more importantly, uninteresting to the general public (who are not mainly to blame for the development). It bothers me for a singular reason; the act of poetry gets closest to that inner life of words which makes them fitting building blocks for the universe.

As such, the retreat of the poets from the public sphere represents a chilling in our dynamic representation of the world to ourselves. Without their insight, their constant creation and recreation of common experiences in uncommon modes, we are provided with a great deal less material to make our world out of. The living meanings of words still and settle to a Websterian state. Dictionaries are taxidermies in many ways; useful for the purposes of education and anatomy but requiring the death of their inhabitants.

The gradual calming of words likewise represents a retreat of the public sphere from poetry, which puts a limit on the potential quality of poetic works. Of course I don’t mean quality in the general sense; the Nobel and the Laureate will always be given (and Pinsky was really quite good). But quality in the tangible sense; that inner life becomes harder to communicate, even as it becomes harder to find. The drive behind the self-imposed isolation of the poets can befound here, I think. It can either be said benevolently that they have found a meaning they can no longer communicate or malignantly that they can no longer find such meaning, and are simply comforting eachother from this loss. Presuming the former, their frustration is perhaps understandable; how would you explain a real rabbit to someone who had only ever seen its stuffed facsimilies?

But that’s an easy question to answer; spread rabbits like rabbits! Flood your city with them, on the walls, the sidewalks, in every position of notice and oddity. Preferably in some yet to be determined and non-permenant manner (not only to avoid that legal ramifications of rabbit littering, but also to allow for their future replacement). This, anyone can accomplish;skill is not required. And in this way, perhaps, the little seeds of meaning each poet constructs can be disseminated to a wider, if immediately less receptive, audience.

Towards a C0bian Aesthetics: Impetus

ac0b — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 20:44:52 +0000

I found aesthetics on the road to Jericho. She was weak and beaten badly, misused by those we all though were her companions. I tended to her, although haphazardly; I did not know much about beautiful things.

She regained herself weakly, but when she had found a bit of composure, she said to me, “You are no great artist.”

“I know,” I replied, “But I am something of a meta-physician, which is perhaps more of what you need at the moment.”

She smiled. “Perhaps you are right.

“And in the case you are, I will tell you something. Something I have told very few of the current age.”

I listened.

“When studying beauty,” she continued, “There is one central question you must ask yourself; ask yourself and incessantly search for an honest answer to. It is this:

How many times

can I cause Francis Bacon to turn in his grave?”

I left aesthetics in whose I hoped were good hands. And since then, in all of my experiments concerning beauty, I have remembered her guiding question. If we are to take a cue from the ancients and think of beauty as something more intimately related to the world than the world is presently comfortable with, it would seem to follow that this connection is also a conduit of influence. Can an aesthetic method be framed so that, when employed, it impacts the world in a predictable manner? Can the whole machine, and its inherent forces, be given knobs to turn? Will the ground at St. Michael’s one day quiver when it is said ‘the aesthetic science’ or ‘beauty is power, with all apologies to Mr. Bacon’?

Epistemology is Libel

ac0b — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 00:26:44 +0000

But that’s a bit of a slander against the subject now, isn’t it; the analogy is not quite so intense. It is important, and relevant, to the extent that post-Gettier academia has focused more on what can be reasonably claimed as knowledge and less on the question of what knowledge itself is. There seem to be two schools of thought on the matter, both a bit misguided:

Internalism, in what has been called an ironic move, burst forth fully skeptical from the head of Descartes. As loosely defined as the school is, it is the most egregious offender in terms of forgetting its own impetus. The constant search for some internally accessible justification of knowledge is tantamount to the search for a good convincing reason to provide in an argument, although the conversation is now a lonely one. Cue MacIntyre, to chide about lacks of good reasons. But being able to defend your knowledge isn’t exactly a sufficient criterion for knowledge. Sophists are not the only, nor the best, knowers.

Externalism has done away with some of the absurdities of the internalist logic, accounting for justification through a variety of passive devices, proper function being perhaps the most insightful of these. But it retains an odd assumption, inherited from classical epistemology: the thought that it is through truth that we come to knowledge. That is, if knowledge is to be something remotely like justified true belief, we must have some mechanism for judging whether or not a belief is true. But what could that mechanism be, if not knowledge itself?

It surprises me at times that there has never been a parallel to the Copernican revolution in epistemology. The knower, with all his flaws, ought to be implicated in knowledge. Which is to say what we are all aware of, that we come to truths through what we know; they are not invented as a means of justification. Perhaps this is the intuition behind externalism, but that system is still diligently searching for the specter of a pre-Gettier formality. Something much more robust and dynamic must emerge if we wish to account for the false knowledge so prevalent in partisan entities, or the body-knowledge emerging from robotic design. Or, at any rate, if we should wish to talk about a largely forgotten subject in other than derisive terms.

Hypothesis Batch2

ac0b — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 03:21:41 +0000

After an extended period of procrastination, Hypothesis Batch 2 is up. Even for a reduced reward (65 cents), the HIT’s were completed very quickly (i.e 70 within a day). We’ll see how creative people feel when the reward is minimal, let’s say 10-20 cents…

In the Image of Engineering

ac0b — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 21:57:27 +0000

I’ve always had an inconvenient affinity for metaphysics. It’s not always the most pleasant interest to have (the subject matter is routinely butchered) and there is certainly little use for it as far as casual conversation goes, but I have this tendency to think of things on a grand scale. Metaphysics, at root, is about the living guts of the world. You can’t get much grander than that.

As it turns out, the guts of the world are curious things. Everybody has an opinion regarding what they are like although most people hold to one of the duller forms of materialism. I am still settling on my own pet theory but I think the world will turn out being a reflection of men. And therefore must change and evolve in the same manner that humankind changes and evolves, as our other various reflections do. And men, before they were rational creatures, and before they were creatures that could promise, were (and remain) creatures that die.

Philosophy is full of the ruin of theories that proclaimed, like so many Ozymandii, their own eternal application. Engineering, by contrast, has generally not made this kind of assumption. Products are often designed with their failure explicitly in mind. Our engines and artifacts are not built as monuments to our nth-great grandchildren. They are called up to serve a purpose for a set period of time, inspire the next generation of themselves, and be replaced. Could a philosophy be designed with this same methodology, mindful of its own failure? What would it mean to adhere to a metaphysic fated to die?

That Pleasant Experiment

ac0b — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 18:07:33 +0000

It seems that my hypothetical experiment was well-received. The batch of 25 theories I had requested was completed in under a day. While this is exciting news, I speculate that it is more of an economic phenomenon than a personal one; $1.25 per HIT is a comparative fortune on Mechanical Turk. Regardless, I have been pleasantly surprised by the responses and user comments. Hence, I am going to branch this project off to another blog, posting the most amusing/most believable results. I will continue funding it until I get tired of the responses. However, I will also be gradually decreasing the amount of money paid per HIT to see if that has any effect on user response. You can find responses at Hypothesis!.

Hypothesis! Theories more fanciful than the general dry lot.

ac0b — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 02:45:21 +0000

The evolution of human thought has passed through several eras of certainty regarding the makeup of the physical world. Our current science is very much indebted to the modern period: Bacon, Newton, Kant and the like. Since the scientific revolution, there have been several generations of thought regarding metaphysics and epistemology which seem to have largely bypassed the more mundane regions of the hard sciences. Perhaps this is because no one has ever ventured to draw a free-body diagram depicting will and representation.

Every now and then I grow tired of knowing so much about the world. When struck by such a moment, I make up a theory, pretend it’s true and make an honest effort at experiencing the world as if it were true (it’s more difficult than you might think!). Two of my personal favorites both involve thinking about trees: one in which they are curled up and sleeping dryads, the other as if their biology were inverted and their leaves were actually their roots. This latter becomes more striking if one has a tendency to anthropomorphism trees, thinking of them as standing with their feet in the ground.

In any event, I’ve grown curious about what other theories might be conceivable in this manner. I’ve decided that each one is worth $1.25 to me and have posted the following HIT on Amazon’s wonderful Mechanical Turk:

Develop a fantastic scientific hypothesis

Pick a certain experience or certain phenomena that are common and well understood: i.e heavy things falling , airplanes flying, or the color of things. Develop a short <400 word explanation of why that phenomena occurs that is entirely wrong. Give intuitive and common sense reasons for why your wrong hypothesis is in fact correct. Consider the following examples:

Example 1: Gravity is caused by an attraction of elements

Gravity is caused by an attraction of like elements. Everyone knows that the world is ordered as an ascending order of elements. Earth is at the bottom, water sits on top of earth, air floats above water, and fire is high up, where the sun and stars are. All objects are composed of these four elements and try to move towards their home. Thus rocks fall through both air and water, water falls, but sits on top of the earth, and when you light a match, the flame rises up.

Example 2: Airplanes fly by injecting steam under their wings

Everyone has seen the contrails that airplanes leave when they fly at particularly high altitudes. What is less commonly understood is the importance of contrails to aviation. Contrails propel aircraft and are caused by streams of extremely hot water vapor that is injected under the airplane wing. The hot steam tries to rise under the wing, lifting the aircraft. At the same time, it is ejected backwards from the plane, providing forward thrust. In a sense, the plane is riding on two rails, but these rails are liquid and temporary. The water vapor is present at all times, but can only be seen at high altitudes where is freezes after coming off the wing. If one views a plane from behind, the burners where the water is vaporized can be clearly seen.

Submissions can reference historical beliefs (i.e. gravity is caused by an attraction of like elements) or be entirely new (i.e. airplanes fly on water rails). In any event, they should be empirically disprovable. Imagine what the world would be like if your hypothesis was in fact correct.

Feel free to leave comments.

We’ll see what comes back. My hypothesis? Well…I really don’t know.

Here goes, manifesto!

ac0b — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 22:05:01 +0000

I became an engineer mostly as the result of stories. (And Legos. Stories and Legos, although the latter are likely more of a prerequisite.) But it wasn’t for the stories that one might think; the lauds of human accomplishment held by historians or seen on Modern Marvels. I am a conceptual creature at heart; the particulars of what has been done in and with the world have never captivated me quite so much as the notion of our doing. All the things we have done, our art and artifacts, share the strange property (as Shelley rightly noted) of turning into dust given an appropriate amount of time. But perseverant creatures that we are, we continue raising new constructs up from that very same tomb of things past. I have always wanted to be among the ranks of those who called up the new world, piece by infinitesimal piece.

I treasured the legends of each great mythological creator: Hephaestus at his forge, Daedalus on and off of Minos, the rabbis and golems of many ages, Adam and the creatures of Eden. This led to some early delusions that I had a form of aesthetic talent. I don’t. A deep appreciation for aesthetics and those who can fashion them, yes of course. But a natural capacity to form art was not among the gifts given unto me. I have neither the consuming passion necessary to be a good artist (as in truly original) nor the self-absorption to be a hack (which might, perhaps, feel the same). This has been a bit off-putting. I feel at times as if I am missing something of that image of God men were supposedly made in. I am not, in a word, a Maker. (Or a re-Maker, as the case may be.)

But I have been given the unique ability to see unity where it is unexpected; to spot commonalities in disparate things. I have never made things in my life (objects, compositions, or ideas) so much as tinkered them into existence, taking a bit of this, a bit of that, and mushing the two together. In a word, all my works are portmanteaus.

Engineering has catered to my constant tinkering. I’ve enjoyed it, particularly preliminary design with its uncertainties, necessitated balances between variables and suspended hope of crafting an object from an idea. But the profession has its frustrations as well. Chief among these, for me, has been the way the field labors under a Newtonian assumption about the world and often forgets to wonder about it. Not the assumption per se (which is fine as far as it goes), but the world. I love the world. I also think there is still a great deal left in it to wonder at, and even more to be gained from cultivating such wonder. More concretely (and more to the immediate point), I think that there are ways of tinkering with it that are notable in engineering only for their absence. In short, it focuses largely on making objects to inject into the world but offers little in the way of altering the ‘world’ experience. This is left to art, which perhaps has become a bit too narcissistic to be up for the task.

I would like to, one day, design experiences. Here’s how I’m going to do it…