Anthropology Talk

The Beatnik generation superseded the Bohemians (Bucky Fuller's generation) and ushered in the subsequent hippie subculture, subsumed within Baby Boomers. Then Gen X and Millennials, Gen Z, Gen Alpha. I'm not claiming these as global terms. Many timelines traverse the same calendrical domain, each offering a perspective.

Philosophy Talk

[ continuing a discussion thread at the M4W Coda ]

Andrius, the response of philosophy to the problematic nature of words, the so-called Linguistic Turn, was not to turn on words as irrelevant because there’s a deeper wordless womb language we can reference instead, when establishing agreement around cognitive frameworks (which themselves involve words and diagrams as we have seen).

I say this because my questioning of your working hypothesis is in alignment with philosophy since Wittgenstein i.e. I’m not really going out on a limb or stating an unheard of view, in suggesting introspection and so-called mental states are not the principal foundation for usage patterns even around such “psychological” words as “understand”, “think”, “pain”. 

These are public language games that require the warp and weft of everyday situations and behaviors to remain anchored (intelligible). 

I believe the cogsci people would benefit from reading LW’s Philosophical Investigations (about investigating the meanings of key philosophical words) because I also think how a lot of cogsci people think about the brain (e.g. that “understanding” must be at bottom a singular identifiable mental process and therefore neural process) is superstitious.

You are, on the other hand, trafficking in what is by definition a low bus numbers philosophy because you’re resting your claims on privileged access to a preverbal language that we’re all supposed to recognize as best articulated by yourself, an argument from authority, “I’m on another level” (e.g. Aristotle's -- your example as I recall) and quasi-universally derided as poor logic. For the record I’m not impressed nor intimidated by these prima donna outbursts.

From my point of view, you got off the philosophy bus (you did take some classes right?) too early, thereby missing some critical puzzle pieces, and struck out on your own, always risky. I wish you well in your endeavors, and hope the gaping holes in your education (from my angle) don’t hamper you too much. You’re presumably finding the ammo you need in that smattering of math topics you favor (I've got mine).

Parting ways is appropriate at this time, as WW has little to offer me regarding world events and geopolitics, which I’ve made clear are my foci these days. Your Wiki page on Putin looked promising, but as is, unchanging, isn't relevant, for reasons I’ve specified in more detail elsewhere.

Daniel per my meeting notes, I’m happy with how Knowledge Engineering is going and given I’m out of town, on a farm, working with the farmer’s schedule, I should free myself of Zoom obligations in the interim. We’ll have more meetups down the road I’m sure, maybe in a different Coda.

One of the Best Documentaries Ever

Taxonomy of Surprise

In some backwaters of philosophy, it's still problematic to associate brain states with concepts as multifarious as "surprising", which we furthermore doubt needs referents in the form of "feelings" to anchor its meaning, any more than "accidental" would need mooring in the feelings zone.

Feelings may accompany discovering it's snowing, not that sunny spring day you so rightfully anticipated. Do you leap for joy because snow is, on the whole, a more fun outcome, with more unexplored potential? Do you curse the fates and shake your fist at the heavens? Do you shrug it off? Do you text a friend? So many questions, too many circumstances. Clearly, words have clear meanings no thanks to the myriad duties to which they're put; in spite of that.

However the idea that the project in philosophy is to get really clear on what "surprising" really means, such that those elusive brain states now emerge, is to cling to a type of nominalism many who think of themselves as philosophers worked hard to let go of. We don't want to re-brainwash ourselves into imagining all these "mental states" that furthermore, in the background, get to be neural signatures.

That way lies putting a skull cap on a dude to see how full of sarcasm he might be, or to get that number for melancholia. We're talking throwback phrenology, but with hands on signals instead of skull shape. Same diff? Lets just say I'm a skeptic. "Surprising" is a social construct mapping to a gazillion situations we overtly encounter in everyday life. No neural maps need apply (and don't, is my guess).

Map Projections (xkcd)

Pro Human PR

Beautiful Ai video based on a poem by ChatGPT

Hypertoons Explained

Quadray Slides

Designing Cities

Sam Hill's Quaker Legacy

Mike Acerra Interviews Kirby

Thinking with Mike Accera, Episode #5

BEAST Deck Review (School of Tomorrow)

Source Code

Intro to Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy

Mental Models

I've been engaged in productive philosophical discussions with Andrius Kulikauskas of Math 4 Wisdom (M4W), a set of partially overlapping study groups and other committees centered around a philosophical language known as Wondrous Wisdom.

Wondrous Wisdom may be grappled with as a stash of cognitive frameworks, ways of organizing core concepts to reflect workflows and progressions. I recommend visiting the Wondrous Wisdom Wiki for more details (visit Vocabulary). 

My frameworks here were influenced and inspired by the ones Andrius has come up with.

The All Seeing Eye represents the sense that we're being watched over or supervised or judged, and we extrapolate that sense to where "even Lucifer feels watched" i.e. no matter how high a demon or angel may consider themselves to be, there's always a sense they're being observed, perhaps by a yet higher consciousness.

The idea of God might be summarized by the meme "every being senses a super being" i.e. a sense of a yet higher self, up to final Self as an omega terminus (alluding to Teilhard de Chardin).

Those not subscribing to God talk may prefer to see Future Humanity as this higher consciousness i.e. future versions of ourselves with the benefit of a lot more hindsight. Others project higher intelligence in the form of ETs, or simply wiser folks, teachers of various kinds, saints and bodhisattvas.

The Unconscious is an endless cornucopia of raw material for dialectical debates, of constant back and forth, is a kind of battleground. 

How else could the ego star as a warrior if not against the backdrop of some polarized space of good vs evil. Without a gradient and a sense of "higher ground" there's nothing to fight for.

The "three minds" in this picture are: the unconscious (peripheral); the conscious (the focus: me within the world) and consciousness (the observer storyteller with its sense of a greater intelligence shining from "behind" or "above").  

Plato's Cinema is of course Plato's Cave, wherein the observer is watching "the movie of my life" meaning some hero's journey in the Joseph Campbell sense. The star (focus) of the show is some "me" surrounded by a "not me" world (environment) that's nevertheless tuned in and therefore part of the world of everyday experience. 

The Unconscious the presently untuned and is peripheral to Conscious content and continually percolates inward, synergizing with existing content, sometimes in surprising ways. 

The Unconscious sometimes comes across as communicating intuitions from that higher self, as the All Seeing Eye is its source as well.

Sometimes and ego may feel overwhelmed by a welling up of unconscious material. The ego is akin to the captain of a ship on sometimes stormy seas, seas inhabited by deep-dwelling unknown creatures.

How do we make mental models in the first place? They form in stages. 

What's new first appears as some "whatson" that needs to be turned in to ascertain its nature and reality, existence itself being a first attribute to test for. "Is this just a mirage?" is a beginning stage question, or "is it real?"  We need to know WHAT "it" is even was we figure out if it's real or not. 

WHAT turns to WHETHER.

Depending on WHETHER something is real (nonfiction) or not (fiction), we will look at HOW and WHY somewhat differently. 

Fictional motives (world domination) and posited mechanisms (anti-gravity engines) may be attributed to the fictional UFO UAPs, whereas a non-fictional Chinese weather balloon will generate more mundane reality-fitting explanations.

A main idea here is we're always updating and revising our mental models. By interrogating them and figuring out key ways to verify or invalidate various aspects of them, we feed an iterative process. 

Sometimes a mental model will go "pop" like a balloon, meaning it will become suddenly unbelievable. We can't always go back and make ourselves believe what we no longer believe.  Systems come and go i.e. they come with a half life.  

Every system is a ticking time bomb until its pull date, one might say. Some have lasted thousands of years, passed down from generation to generation. However, given their context keeps changing, it's usually difficult to claim a system has "stayed the same" even within a single generation.  Systems keep morphing, to keep up with the times they're in.

Enabling Societal Debate: Knowledge Graphs

Knowledge Engineering Study Group

Ant colonies accomplish internal communications by means of pheromones, chemical signatures which spread at the speed of smell. 

In this and similar meetups of the Knowledge Engineering Study Group, we fleshed out more of the biology around ants, likewise a way to appreciate the current state of bioinformatics as a discipline

For more meeting notes and links, check the M4W Coda.

Dance Music

Eisenfunk - Pong

Intro to Symbolic Dynamics

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A TrimTab Presentation

David Koski on the BEAST modules

The US Civil War: A Study in Failed Social Engineering

A central thesis of The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand, is that Pragmatism is in part a reaction to Dogmatism, where the latter typifies a mindset unable to avoid a Civil War. People pay too high a price for principle, based on a sense of self-righteousness. Not pragmatic.

What had failed to prevent the US Civil War was in particular the Bible, used to inflame and promote zealotry on all sides. Everyone grew up learning from it, and all Sunday school programming derived from it, yet when push came to shove, a Bible-oriented upbringing (i.e. one's training in Christianity) didn't show the way out, and mayhem ensued. 

Cain rose against Abel as a great union (a federation), an experiment in social engineering if there ever was one, tore in half. So maybe the Bible didn't have all the answers? Enter pragmatism.

Even among theologians, a healthy skepticism arose: leaning on the saints, on the gospels, on the ancient Greeks (especially Aristotle) for all one's thinking could only be out of laziness. Times change. The new mantra: think for yourself. That's reliable because, per Transcendentalism (as well as Quakerism): you have your God within you (St. Aquinas had said much the same thing).

Emerson's exhortations seemed to awaken a universal capacity lurking within the soul of everyman (to use a sexist vocabulary), whereas Whitman conveyed that freeing sense of a blank slate, or at least a new one, a fresh canvas, full of promise and adventure, a new world. A world without the blemish of slavery.

Fast forward to our day and say we're in a Palestinian Studies class. The analogies are clear, as the headlines today are about the illegitimacy of forced displacement (what happened to many of these families in the first place) versus whether families have an inherent freedom to escape from harm's way. 

If Gaza has been an open air prison, then why not give everyone a travel pass and tickets to some New Gaza of their choice, with those remaining the ones choosing to hold the fort, until sanity returns to the region? Help everyone stay in touch. Open the system to other refugee populations as well, as we boot up a system of routing hubs especially designed to help out in emergency situations.

That may sound like a kind of Zionism, this proposal to facilitate establishing Palestinian colonies elsewhere (so "ethnic cleansing" then?), including well outside of West Asia. How about in Cuba for instance, at a place called Guantanamo, now used for R&R. Keep it a fun place, while putting it to a serious good use. Lose the "bad neighborhood" reputation built up for it by the torture taxi club. 

In considering all these issues, remember how President Lincoln thought: he was very open to the idea of Blacks leaving en masse, for Liberia, for Central America, for Haiti. So were a lot of the abolitionists.  End slavery; send them home. But Lincoln didn't want to "send" people against their wills. He might have been prophetic in many ways, but he didn't have twenty-twenty foresight; almost no one does. Not all of the time. If the opportunity were properly presented...

Obviously, once you've invested your heart and soul in Alabama or Tennessee or whatever, it's not that easy to want to move anywhere else. But think of how part of the allure of the US military is the opportunities it offers to see the world. Some people will be up for it, especially if free to come back, if only for visits. The new libertarianism posits each human is born with an inherent right to explore the planet; and nation-states are not intended as barriers to this human right so much as facilitators thereof.

As a Palestinian, opting for a stint or tour in Jordan or Kuwait was never seen as conceding that Palestine is no longer innately a state, if only a diaspora state, much like Kurdistan, or Tibet are. Or Intel and Hilton.

Palestine persists, but not as a synonym for any other entity. 

Palestine is not a caliphate, nor necessarily an ethno-state of any kind, which is how it manages to realistically aspire to provide a safe haven to a great many ethnicities, like the USA hopes to, and China, including new Islamic sects indigenous to North America, perhaps with histories tracing back to Black Panthers and Malcolm X in some cases. 

New branches of Judaism are welcome as well. These world religions are all good at getting along with each other, especially when they're not merely real estate agents and property management companies in disguise, using religion as more acceptable packaging or as a tax dodge.

What I'm suggesting is that nextgen North Americans (and not only them) would benefit by using current events in West Asia to inform their own developing views of the US Civil War, which is quite a bit further back in time and sometimes much obscured by the gases and dusts of intervening generations. The thought patterns remain important. Read more Octavia Butler maybe?

I underline "North Americans" because it's a history that's already readily accessible to you if you live here, through monuments (Statue of Liberty) and movies, and because "Refugees Я Us" i.e. accommodating refugees, migrants, people on the move, is part of our destiny, our role, as denizens of a New World, as polyglot pioneers from all genetic and epigenetic lineages. 

We wish to not fail hard as social engineers of our own futures, and we study history to learn from our track record as hominids etc. We see mistakes, and successes. We've been smart sometimes too.

BEAST: A Particle Zoo

History of Pragmatism

Metaphysical Club (School of Tomorrow)

Intro to German Idealism

Philosophy Book Clubs

Some of us have studied The Metaphysical Club, which graphs a school of thought usually labeled as American pragmatism. At the outset, we're reminded how this layer of American heritage was forged in the US Civil War.

Readers in the far future, meaning in the 21st Century say, tend to forget all the nuances that swirled in the wake of the US's establishment as a nation-state, still very much in the process of spreading westward. To what extent would additional states, in the process of being added, permit the institution of slavery within their midst?

Accompanying acts of emancipation, on through the Civil Rights period, was the rise of mechanization, including escalators and elevators and the possibility of high rises (some qualifying as "skyscrapers"). In both the lineages of the pragmatists and the transcendentalists came Buckminster Fuller (the grand nephew of Margaret Fuller) with his forward-looking "energy-slave" concept: our machines would slave for humanity, increasingly effectively, freeing humanity itself from the scourge of slavery.

We would still need skilled professionals, people who knew how to leverage their work with automation. These would not be slaves however, so much as the master faculty and apprentice students of an emergent "global university" (another metaphor for Spaceship Earth).

Over at the Trim Tab Book Club, we've been alternately reading books by, and then about, said Buckminster Fuller, a prominent and prophetic futurist through much of the 20th Century. His ideas about a "design science revolution" anticipated the advance of "copyleft" policies among source code engineers.

I'm signed up for Sociology through what I'm seeing as within the NPU framework, in turn friendly with my School of Tomorrow based here in Oregon (NPU and PSU are linked in my thinking). 

It's through that reading program, undertaken with other scholars online, that I was cued regarding The Metaphysical Club as relevant background reading. We're interested in continuing to stream these streams.

Course Viewing

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Comment:  

@kirbyurner

Speaking of pronouns (aren’t we always), the blob arrogantly assumes it speaks for Americans, whereas it’s just one more ethnicity, characterized by the usual Manifest Destiny mental illness. We are not an empire. We’re a conquered people struggling to win our freedom. We Americans, that is. 

Xref:
Sharing About Geopolitics

"... a conquered people"

Guest Appearance (2021)

Project 69 and McLuhan

Modes of Reasoning

If you're like me, you admired the fictional Sherlock Holmes for his powers of deduction. 

Now we're being corrected by a teacher, Umberto Ecco, author of The Name of the Rose.

Me: OK, so you want to be a stickler and split hairs: Sherlock was good at induction then. 

"Nope" says the teacher, "he was good at abduction more than anything".

Abduction? What on earth...?

The above video makes the differences clear:

• induction gives us discoveries (which could be wrong)
• deduction gives us valid claims if the premises are true
• abduction gives us explanations (which could be wrong)

You'll hear the philosopher in the video characterizing both induction and abduction as "invalid" which sounds too harsh to my ears, given the exigencies of existence. We might be better off saying "not bulletproof" instead.  

Using a shield is a valid strategy; even if it proves insufficient, that doesn't invalidate having given it a try. To say "induction" is an invalid form of reasoning sounds like advising we should avoid use it. On the contrary, it's the best mode we've got in many instances.

Sure, exceptions may get through our defenses, disrupting our narrative, and causing our theoretical edifice to crumble if the ad hoc patches won't save it. 

But that doesn't mean we were necessarily careless or thoughtless in creating said edifice. We did what we could, with the information available. Perhaps we could have dug for more info. Sometimes more due diligence is in order. Ah, the wisdom of hindsight. Sometimes we fool ourselves.

Sherlock Holmes could have been wrong: Watson might've never have been in Afghanistan. But Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was in charge of the story and knew from the art of storytelling that making a character's signature superpower too unreliable might undermine the intended plotlines. 

Have Holmes be right to an uncanny degree. Endow him with an enviable track record.

We're to credit Charles Sanders Peirce for vectoring "abduction" into our namespace, meaning he gave it momentum and spin. Peirce is usually categorized as one of the American pragmatists, along with John Dewey, Richard Rorty, William James and Buckminster Fuller.

The term "abduction" playfully exudes a different meaning as well: it's what aliens do when they suddenly transport a human to a new vista (say their spaceship), and then (typically) restore said human to the pre-abduction environment, but now with memories of the sudden state change. 

To be abducted is like a sudden channel change, or like an imposed drug trip versus one sought out. Abduction comes as a surprise. The word "abduction" therefore has a hint of "unlikely explanation" given how tales of ETs are considered fringe in some circles.

I taken the UFO-flavored meaning of abduction to more clearly explain a computer science notion of "decoration" and more specifically to expound upon Python's "decorator syntax". Check it out.

Computer Generated Hypertoons

I'm always wondering what a production house with some serious animators could make from my primitive "hypertoon" concept.

The idea is a simple one: think of a smooth transformation between A and B, nevermind yet what exactly is transforming. Label A and B as "key frames". Now imagine scenarios A to C and B to C. We now have a triangle. A point D with scenarios to A, B, C would now complete a tetrahedron.

A "scenario" could be like a cuboctahedron (A) twist-contracting into an icosahedron (B) ala the Jitterbug Transformation. That icosahedron (A) could then spin around 31 axes (opposite corners, mid-edges, face centers) yielding a great circle network (C). The network (C) could then shift, with some circles staying, others forming, others fading, to give the 25 great circles of the cuboctahedron (D). Add A to D. D to B might involve some kind of global sharing.

The hypertoon "playhead" displays scenarios between key frames. When it gets to a key frame, a decision is made, perhaps randomly, perhaps weighted, and a next scenario gets played. There's a sense of smooth transformations throughout, as the viewer visually tours the "space" of interconnecting scenarios. The network might be compared to a spaghetti ball.

Key frames that link to themselves, i.e. that start and end on the same frame, might sometimes run a number of times in a loop.

Search on "hypertoons" in the search box at the upper left for more, including some running examples.

Sharing About Geopolitics

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