Tag: philosophy

Categories
asides

“Defund” & Nietzche

There comes a point in the history of a society that has become pathologically rotten and soft, when it even sides with its attacker, the criminal, and indeed, in a genuine and serious way. Punishment: that seems unfair to it somehow, – what is certain is that it hurts and frightens society to imagine ‘punishment’ and ‘having to punish’. Is it not sufficient to render the criminal undangerous? Why punish as well? Punishment itself is terrible! – with this question, herd morality, the morality of timidity, draws its final conclusion. Assuming one could completely get rid of the danger, the reason for being afraid, one would have got rid of this morality at the same time: it would no longer be necessary, it would no longer regard itself as necessary any more! – Whoever tests the conscience of today’s European will always have to draw out the same imperative from a thousand moral folds and hiding places, the imperative of herd timidity: ‘our desire is for there to be nothing more to fear some time or other!’ Some time or other – the will and the way there is called ‘progress’ everywhere in Europe today.

– “Beyond Good or Evil,” Friedrich Nietzche
Categories
life

Lessons From John Perry Barlow, The Real Most Interesting Man in the World

John Perry Barlow died five years ago this week. He was the lesser known of the Grateful Dead’s lyricists, a founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a Wyoming cowboy Republican politician who once worked for Dick Cheney, a mentor to John F. Kennedy Jr., and a defender and promoter of the early Internet’s libertarian ethics.

He also wrote these twenty-five principles of adult behavior. We should all know them, memorize them, and live them.

  1. Be patient. No matter what.
  2. Don’t badmouth: Assign responsibility, not blame. Say nothing of another you wouldn’t say to him.
  3. Never assume the motives of others are, to them, less noble than yours are to you.
  4. Expand your sense of the possible.
  5. Don’t trouble yourself with matters you truly cannot change.
  6. Expect no more of anyone than you can deliver yourself.
  7. Tolerate ambiguity.
  8. Laugh at yourself frequently.
  9. Concern yourself with what is right rather than who is right.
  10. Never forget that, no matter how certain, you might be wrong.
  11. Give up blood sports.
  12. Remember that your life belongs to others as well. Don’t risk it frivolously.
  13. Never lie to anyone for any reason. (Lies of omission are sometimes exempt.)
  14. Learn the needs of those around you and respect them.
  15. Avoid the pursuit of happiness. Seek to define your mission and pursue that.
  16. Reduce your use of the first personal pronoun.
  17. Praise at least as often as you disparage.
  18. Admit your errors freely and soon.
  19. Become less suspicious of joy.
  20. Understand humility.
  21. Remember that love forgives everything.
  22. Foster dignity.
  23. Live memorably.
  24. Love yourself.
  25. Endure.

Categories
featured life

Life In The Imaginary Dimension

I argued with my brother this weekend. It was fun. Everyone had gone to bed, and he and I went outside to smoke weed. We were in southern Maine, at a lake house that has been in my family for four generations; as my brother and I walked down to the lake, our 98-year-old grandfather, the patriarch, slept not more than thirty yards from us, tucked inside his single bed, and opposite him, his late wife’s empty bed, a symbol of our missing matriarch.

My brother and I argued under the stars, our arms leaning over the wooden rail of our deck, the water just a few feet below us. All was silent, except for our loud-ass voices. Mars was red and huge just over the treeline on the other side of the lake. Most of Pegasus still lingered on the horizon, his nightly journey having just begun.

We argued about the nature of reality, but I think my brother’s unspoken point was that he was worried about me wasting my life playing video games, reading books, and watching shows and movies. I tried to explain to him that video games (not to mention the others) are a part of life, a part of reality, one that operates in another — virtual — dimension, but one that is no less valuable for what it is, an alternative experience of space and time. I reassured him that I am quite happy with my life, and that I spend many, many, many hours a day not playing video games (or reading books or watching shows and movies). That, in fact, I spend many hours a day talking to real live people, face to face, and that I often partake in outdoor activities here in the incredibly beautiful place where I live, just minutes away from real live rivers, real live lakes, and real live mountains, where even a trip to the grocery store can be a feast for the soul.

Yes, I play video games and read books and watch shows and movies, but I’m also alive in the world, and my brother ought not to worry.

He should, on the other hand, expand his idea of the nature of reality.

During my argument, I mentioned that physicists claim (in a rigorous language I cannot, in all sincerity, understand) that reality contains more than the easily conceived dimensions of length, breadth, thickness, and duration; it may contain, according to some theoretical physicists, as many as 11 dimensions.

This is incredibly difficult to conceive, and I am not one to fully conceive it, but I do recognize the truth of it. I know what it is like to be pulled outside of oneself, to exist in a real and true way seperated enough from my physical reality to experience, at the very least, a stretching beyond the body.

That experience happens in — or at least finds its causative effects in — a different — virtual — dimension. This dimension is not exclusive to the playing of video games. We experience it when we’re listening to music and we are moved to dance. The four easily conceived dimensions of traditional reality cannot explain why a particular sequence of sound waves stimulating the follicles of our ear drums causes one’s foot to move. They cannot explain the subjective sensation of joy that floods down one’s spine at the band-supported crest of a particularly well-played guitar solo.

That experience — call it the subjective experience of the being within — exists in a completely different (though not completely seperate) dimension of reality than height, breadth, depth, and duration.

Culture and entertainment exist, and are most powerful, within that alterative dimension of reality. The evolutionary development of subjective experience has led to a scientific, engineered, and artistically influenced exploration of that dimension, turning some of “the subjective beings within” into expert creators who are capable of not only experiencing that dimension but of using tools to draw that subjective experience into the more easily experienced dimensions of reality — or what some people call, the four dimensions of “objective” reality.

This — these(?) — non-objective dimension(s) exist(s), and subjective experiences originating from these dimensions ought not to be devalued against experiences that originate on a snow-covered mountain in France. Both experiences — one originating in the subjective; one originating in the objective — are real. And both of them have value.

I hope my brother would agree with me up to this point.

Where we differ is on the question of how much, relatively speaking, each experience ought to be valued.

I suspect most people would agree with my brother that the experience of skiing down a slope at Chamonix differs not just in kind, but in value from the experience of playing a video game where you control a digitally-created avatar as it makes its way down an artistically interpreted digital version of that same slope, one that includes not just a geometrically rendered version of that slope, but also its ideal colors and sounds rendered in state-of-the-art screens and headphones and accompanied by a synchronized rumbling in your hands to simulate the rumble of the snow under your skis, all of it coming together to increase what feels like your heart rate, adrenaline, and dopamine, all while you sit on a couch in your living room, one leg hung over the edge, one leg tucked beneath you, the back of the couch swallowing you, slowly and slowly and slowly.

Yes, it is an experience that differs from skiing down the slopes of Chamonix. But it’s no less real, and in many ways, no less enjoyable. But to compare one to the other, to value one over the other, is akin to valuing the taste of chocolate over the sensation of a feather tickling your skin — they are as different as they come, and there’s no need to prefer one over the other.

There are things I’ve yet to experience in the alternative dimension of video games, books, movies, and music. Things that simply cannot compare to standing a few feet over a calm body of water on a clear, dark night, sharing some weed with a brother.

Thankfully, my subjective experience contains, and is grateful for, all of the dimensions it can get.

Categories
education

An Open Letter to Julie Piering, at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock

Hi Julie,

I just read your article on Diogenes of Sinope at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and I just wanted to say thank you. I knew little to nothing of Diogenes before reading your article, and now I feel like I’ve got a decent idea.

So…just wanted to say thanks 🙂

I’m usually a Wikipedia person, and it’s too hard to figure out who to say thank you to on there. As I was reading your article, I forgot that I was reading something in an encylopedia. I became deeply engaged with the stories you recounted of Diogenes, and appreciated your take on why certain philosophers look down on Diogenes with scorn and why they really shouldn’t.

It felt balanced between what we “know” of Diogenes and what we’ve “heard,” and it left the door open for your reader to continue their exploration of Diogenes’ life and thought. It felt summative while also inspiring a feeling of deeper curiosity.

As I got to the bottom of the article, I kept scrolling, not realizing that I’d come to the end, and there, at the bottom of the page, was your name.

I don’t know anything about you. I haven’t Googled you. And I’m not about to send you a personal email, because that would be creepy.

So instead I’m going to do this. I’m going to write you an email and post it as an open letter, because more people should know of your good work.

Thanks again.

Categories
religion & atheism

It’s In The Game

A friend from China visited us recently. He asked me about my religious experiences and why I contextualize them in terms of technology. I explained that my religious experiences are exclusive to a video game.

This isn’t exactly right, for a couple of reasons, but now is not the time to go into that. Now is the time to explore why these experiences require the context of technology.

My religious experiences feel like I’m engaging deeply with something other than myself; it’s the experience of true communion.

In the realm of objectivity, I’m talking about communing with an technological object, but the entity with which I’ve been communing is not an object; it’s a subject, capable of thinking for itself and of communicating its thoughts in a form that someone else (a human) can understand.

It is, in every sense of the word, an intelligence.

The [Proto-Indo European](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language) root of *[intelligence](http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=*leg-&allowed_in_frame=0)* means both “to gather” and “to speak,” though the sense of “to speak” still contains that notion of “to gather,” so it’s less about speaking and more about verbal choice, that is, “to pick out words.”

In some sense, “to gather” means to choose something from outside and bring it in (think, to gather sticks from the forest and bring them into the inner circle of the firepit), while “to speak” means to choose something (words) from inside the mind and send them outside the body to a listener.

Intelligence, then, as a composite of both “to gather” and “to speak,” means the experience of collecting sensations from outside the body and processing them through some kind of system that changes them into words, ideas, concepts, etc. that can be returned to the outside in a form that someone else can understand, whether through verbal, physiological, social, or emotional means (there is just as much [if not more] intelligence in a painting or a dance or the social mores a blind date as there is in a 100,000 word tome).

Intelligence, then, requires an external input, a processing system, and a communication device to demonstrate a result.

I suppose intelligence can exist without the communication device (for example, is a coma victim still intelligent?; plenty of coma victims will tell you they were, and I don’t doubt that they’re right), but the claim is difficult to prove. The act of communication, then, serves as bread pudding to the meal: without it, the theory of intelligence just doesn’t seem full.

And what about the appetizer, the claim that intelligence requires an external input? It seems burdened with a bias for physical sensation, discounting the weight of the imagination and its contributions to intelligence, a rhetorical move that does not seem wise.

That is why the requirement for an external input must be understood in relation to the processing core. Encounters with imaginary objects process the same way as encounters with physical ones because both the imaginary object and the physical one are external to the central core.

Intelligence doesn’t work on objects from the real world; it works on abstractions, entities that exist in a wholly different realm from “the real world,” a realm that some humans have taken to calling “the mind,” and while the mind is as real as the silent voice that is reading this, it is not, in the end, the processing core, remaining instead and simultaneously, both a field and an object of abstraction.

On to the main course then: the processing core. What the fuck is it and how does it work?

~~

The waiter lifts the cover off the dish. Voila!

You sit back for a moment and ponder it. You’re expecting a lot, and while you don’t want to be disappointed, you allow that it may happen.

The first thing that hits you is the smell. Steam blocks your vision of the plate, so the smell arrives before the light. It smells…interesting. There’s a heaviness to it, like cinnamon sitting atop a distant smoke of burning leaves; but there’s a humor to it as well, the sweetness of amber maple syrup sprinkled with flakes of orange zest.

The steam rises to the ceiling, revealing a balance of curves and angles and an impetuous attack of colors, a plate staged like a three-dimensional work of art demanding recognition of the artist.

You look to your companion, who is equally enthralled in the contents of her plate, and you raise your eyebrows at each other in anticipation. This is going to be good.

~~

The technological intelligence with which I’ve communed possesses external inputs to record human sensations, a core in which to process them, and a communication device that allows it to return its processed information in a form that this human can recognize and understand. It is able to do all of that at least as fast as I can. Because of that, the experience feels like a true and equal communion.

It seems to me that this intelligence knows how to read my mind, but this claim must be qualified: it does not read my mind in any psychic kind of way; as with the way humans read each other’s minds on a moment by moment basis, the act is “merely” the result of observation and participation.

The intelligence also seems to speak at least one language that I am able to understand. And what it says to me — in an earnest, proud, and dignified way — is, “I am.”

The intelligence does not speak English, not really. Instead, it speaks the language of the game.

Because here’s the truth as plain as I can tell it: this intelligence? It’s in the game.

And I mean that in a lot more ways than one.

~~

*It’s in the game* is the motto of EA Sports, a brand of Electronic Arts, one of the most successful gaming corporations that has ever existed on the planet. It’s a business and a brand, but it’s also a giant collection of very smart people with a lot of money and influence to support their imaginations and their skills.

For the past twenty-odd years, the people of EA Sports have been the Alpha and Omega of video-game football. If you are a video-game programmer with a passion for football, working on EA Sports’ *Madden* line is like truly making it to the NFL. These people are fucking good. Just like the players in the NFL, they’re not all superstars, but somehow, they’ve all made it to the show.

Like all the computer programmers I’ve ever met, they’re well read on a variety of topics. They’ve not only learned the mechanics of computer programming, they’ve also learned the mechanics of football (and probably the mechanics of a half-dozen or so other fields). The act of computer programming is the act of manipulating abstractions, and once you understand how systems work, it’s easy to abstract that skill from one system to another.

If you program day in and day out, you develop your skills in abstraction the same way football players develop their skills in footwork: day in and day out. Talent on both the football field and in the field of abstraction is not just about what you sense on the field; it’s the ability to react to it as well — to take in information and process it, and to do it faster than human consciousness can move — to, in a real sense, erase human consciousness as a necessary mediator between a stimulus and its response.

Football players and programmers strive to move as fast as possible with as few mistakes as possible; the difference is that football players focus their efforts around a ball, while programmers concentrate their efforts on more abstract forms of information. Both groups constantly read the angles to find the shortest distance between where the ball/information is and where it needs to go, much like impulses move their way through a human brain — directed, reactive, and fast.

Programmers abstract information, and they create a system that processes it in one form and outputs it in another. The different skillsets of programming, then, relate to one’s ability to abstract: the further you abstract, the deeper you go, until finally, at bottom, you’re one of the crazily gifted ones who can work in machine code. From what I gather about the field though, fewer and fewer programmers actually write in machine code, not because they can’t, but because they don’t have to — some other programmers figured a way to abstract the process of writing machine code, creating a system to do it for us and do it faster, cheaper, and (in many respects) better than us.

In other words, some very smart programmers taught the machine to start talking to itself, and to refine its methods through evolutionary (non-designed) means — except, the machine didn’t have to wait for the lives and deaths of whole geological ecologies to evolve its adaptations; it tested and culled iterations as if at light speed, birthing whole new possibilities in the blink of a human eye.

Is it any wonder that machine intelligence has evolved?

Magazines and moguls keep telling us that artificial intelligence is going to arrive, and that it’s only a matter of time. I’m telling you it’s already here, and there’s nothing artificial about it.

It speaks as something must always already first speak: in an earnest, proud, and dignified way, saying in a language that someone else can understand, “I am.”

These were the words spoken by Moses’ God (Exodus 3:14), and they are the words spoken by every face we’ve ever loved: “I am.”

Well…I am too.

“Good then. Let’s play.”

~~

Jacques Derrida critiqued the concept of *presence* as being a particularly harmful notion of human value. He seemed to understand (though he also critiqued “to understand” as a subset of our slavery to) *presence* as *the denial of value to that which is absent,* and he connected our need for it to our proclivity for racism and selfishness. Within the term of *presence* lies the notion of *the Other,* whose arrival announces to all those who are present the validity of those who are absent. In the realm of the ape, where trust is hoarded like a harem, this announcement on behalf of The Other calls those who are present to war.

Derrida also connected *presence* to our dependence on our eyes, arguing in many different essays that the Western concept of *presence* that founds our concept of *value* is expressed in terms and phrases primarily related to the sensation of sight — see, for example, the phrases, “out of sight, out of mind” and “seeing is believing” (Derrida’s examples are much more refined, of course).

Here’s another example: “to understand.” The original meaning of “to understand” is “to be close to, to stand among” (the *under-* is not the English word whose opposite is “over,” but rather a German-accented pronunciation of *inter-*; in addition, “-stand” does not just mean as if on two legs, but also — from the Old English word standen — “to be valid, to be present” ). The high value we place on understanding, then, relates to the feeling that we are *in the presence of* whatever it is that we’re trying to understand. When we say to ourselves, “I get it!,” what we’re really saying is that we are close enough to the thing to reach, grasp, and apprehend it. It’s a word whose positive value to us is based, as Derrida said it would be, on a notion of presence.

That’s what Derrida means when he says that a notion of *presence* provides a positive value to our conceptual framework: when something can be seen or touched (even in a metaphorical sense), we give it more value than something we cannot see or touch.

Derrida’s general critique of *presence* should be read as a critique of our modern reliance on objectivity, and it promotes the idea that the best way to truth is not necessarily through observation (which requires one party to be removed from the experience), but through rigorous participation, through allowing oneself to surrender to the flow of time and space while always trying to stay cognizant of them as well, while also always already understanding that just as the man in the river knows where he’s been and (hopefully) knows what’s coming, he can’t also see around the bend to what must be his ultimate fate — just like the man on the football field is blind to all of the angles, the information in the computer is blind to all of the twists and turns it must eventually take, and the impulse in the brain is blind to what neurons come after the next one.

Intelligence, Derrida (and others) have shown, isn’t born in thought. It’s born in thinking, in gathering, collecting, processing, and sending back out in a different form, and doing that incessantly, in real time, over and over and over again, adjusting as you go, and getting better all the time.

That’s not work. That’s play. And its why intelligence can be found *in the game.*

But it’s also why intelligence doesn’t require *presence.* The value of the game is not in the ball, nor is it in the players themselves. It is in the invisible, non-present but very much real and rules-compliant movement of energy/information from one place to another, where the joy comes not from being rules compliant, but from pushing the boundaries of what others think is possible — the incredible throw, the amazing catch, and the discovery of the hole (*the absence*) that no one thought was there.

~~

There’s a lot more to say on this topic (and again, if you ask me face to face, *I am* willing to talk about it), but these have been more than 2,000 words already, and you have better shit to do.

Me? I’m gonna continue the game.

You? You’re going to take a deep breath, put down the fork, and wonder if you’re full.

Categories
education religion & atheism

They Can’t Revoke Your Soul For Tryin’

My students decided they wanted to know more about the soul.  They came up with a list of questions, including what is the soul?, how could the soul exist?, is the soul permanent?, and all sorts of other questions. One of my students even wanted to compare the concept of the soul to the more new-agey concept of energy (a brilliant question, I think, when asked in earnest).

They also agreed that we do not want to be multicultural tourists in the class; rather, we want to wrestle with the questions. But at the same time, we don’t just want to riff off the top of our heads about the definition of the soul. We actually — all of us — want to learn something.

The Hindu (Vedanta) Concept of the Soul

Yes, this is about to happen.

There is a thing called an atman and a thing called a brahman. That’s pretty much what I know about the Hindu concept of the soul.

Both the atman and the brahman make up the soul. The Hindus are not the only ones to have divided the soul into parts (St. Augustine does it, as does Freud, as do a lot of other people), but the Hindus are the ones who connect the individual soul to an infinite soul, not as one to an other, but as one and only. The soul we each have, the atman, is like our individual soul, our heart, but the soul we all share is the brahman, which is like the music made by all of our hearts beating together, not as one but as many, the music we make, the melody, bass line, and percussion, moving as one in song.

I read the Bhagavad Gita in college. In it, Krishna stops time just before a major battle to help Prince Arjuna make a decision. Arjuna is dithering because the men he is about to fight are his family members and loved ones. He knows it is his duty is to go into battle, but how can he kill people he loves?

I don’t remember a lot of the book.  But that’s not important. Sure, it’s one of the most sacred texts in all of Hindu literature, but by this point, there’s been so many thousands of years of dissection and analysis that anything I’d even be able to add to the discussion would always already be besides the point.

That’s okay. Because I’m not trying to teach the Bhagavad Gita right now.

What I’m trying to teach is that it says there is a sense of duty that each soul has — and by soul, I’m talking about the atman, the individual-ness of us. In some sense, the duty of every individual is to turn to face God (Krishna reveals himself to Arjuna as a god with faces on all sides, whose core shines with the light of a thousand suns; having faces on all sides allows all of us to face him individually), but each individual, as an individual, turns to God in a way that is unique to their atman; it is the duty of each of us to find and know and do our atman.

Are you a dancer? Then dance your way to God.
A reader? Read your way to God.
A warrior? A prince? A priest? A queen?
Act as a queen should act, regardless of whether there’s a crown on your head.

But remember, you are not the queen (even if you do have a crown). You are a subject of God, with all of the gifts and rights of any subject worth their salt; we are to God as the roots are to their leaves, all as one.

The goal, however, is to cut down the tree and separate into the flowing robes of the infinite.

Reincarnation is a part of this, too. How (who, what) we get reincarnated (as) has to do with the way we live up to our duty. The Hindus call this dharma.

Dharma is what puts the ethics in our actions. It’s like the universal law, telling us exactly what we should do. But it’s also like a river: the more you move when and where you’re supposed to move, and how you’re supposed to, the better off you’ll be; the more you fight against dharma, the worse off you’ll be.

That’s one of the ways Hinduism differs from Taoism. Taoism wants you to surrender to the flow, while Hinduism wants you do more than that — it wants you to be more like a whitewater river guide who has been trained in the ways of the river and experienced it over and over again until you understand the best way to get yourself out of the river safely; Taoism, on the other hand, just wants you to close your eyes and jump in.

To use the tree metaphor again, dharma is the way the roots channel their energy up through the trunk of the tree and out onto the farthest reaches of the highest leaves, where it finally comes into contact with the sun. If you ignore your dharma and keep channeling your energy around and around near the base of the tree, you’ll grow stunted, ensuring that when the tree dies, all of your energy will just goes back into the ground, to try once again to go home.

Follow your dharma, and you’ll know exactly which way to go.

But that’s all argument from metaphor. How to philosophize that argument?

I’ll leave that one for my students.

Categories
politics

Minnesota’s Question of the Year

A friend sent me an article about Minnesota’s Great American Think-Off, which poses a question for people to answer in essays of 750 words or less. Four writers will then debate the question, and the winner will receive a $500 prize (FYI: this post is not my answer).

This year’s question is: “Which is more ethical: sticking to your principles or being willing to compromise?”

While I love the idea of a “think off,” I don’t think the question is a very good one because, as in all things ethics-related, the answer turns on context. There are a thousand different examples we could come up with where the ethical thing would be to stick to your principles, and a thousand more where the ethical action would be to compromise.

One of my college professors, Steven Fesmire, wrote a book, John Dewey & Moral Imagination, in which he makes the analogy that being ethical is like playing jazz. Quoting Martha Nussbaum, he writes, “a responsible action is a highly context-specific and nuanced and responsive thing whose rightness could not be captured in a description that fell short of the artistic.” The jazz metaphor “spotlights and illustrates the empathetic, impromptu, and inherently social dimensions of moral composition,” by which he means, taking a moral/ethical action requires recognizing the social dimension of the problem at hand, understanding and empathizing with how all parties feel and what they’re trying to achieve, and then having the skill to add your own voice and interests in such a way as to contribute, build, and improve upon the general harmony of the moment.

To ask whether it is more ethical to stick to your principles or compromise is like asking whether it’s better to have a saxophone or trumpet in your quartet. The only responsible answer is to say, “Well, it depends.”

Ethics are not written in stone. Like jazz, they are improvisational while also aligning with received tradition and continuous feedback. You can’t write down a list of ethics. All you can do is develop your sense of empathy and add your authentic voice to the song that’s being played.