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

:: a global affairs channel ::

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.