Dakryn's Batshit Theory of the Week

[Einherjar86]

A couple cool tidbits in the back of Peter Watts's Maelstrom:

Those of you who have taken an undergraduate physiology course may remember the power law. It's a surface-area-to-volume relationship that governs living systems from whole food webs right down to the capillaries of shrews - essentially a pattern typical of self-organizing (i.e. biological) systems. As it turns out, the World Wide Web itself appears to be evolving in accordance with this law. Something to think about...

These days it's hardly necessary to cite references on the subject of "artificial life": a web search on the phrase (or on "cellular automata") will demonstrate how massively the field has exploded over the past ten years. That subset of e-life that goes by the name Anemone [i.e. in Watts's book] is admittedly a bit more speculative, and based upon two premises. The first is that simple systems, in aggregate, display emergent behaviors beyond the capability of their individual parts. This is pretty much self-evident within a body - who'd deny that a brain is smarter than an individual neuron, for example? - but the principle extends even to aggregations of completely unconnected individuals. A school of fish or a flock of birds can be thought of, in effect, as a diffuse neural net.

A related premise is that lineages with genetically determined behavior would be able to pass a Turing test if they evolved fast enough. This won't be hard to swallow for anyone familiar with how sophisticated such behavior can be; we do, after all, live in a world where ants practice animal husbandry, birds follow orthodome routes to navigate halfway around the world, and honeybees convey sophisticated travel instructions by wiggling their asses at each other. Skeptics might want to read any of E.O. Wilson's books on socio-biology...

 

[Jimmy... Dead.]

wat

 

[jakethedog]

Einherjar: I'm not sure what you're trying to say man. Are you saying that because we don't all think/act in unison, that we are less likely to evolve further? I've never been the type who's really been on track with what most other people in our society is thinking, so it's kind of hard for me to accept that...

I'm always willing to listen (and do listen) to others ideas, but I feel like no matter what, we're always going to think differently, and there's never really going to be "one" right answer for everyone... hope that makes sense.

 

[Einherjar86]

Well, those are both quotes, so... in a sense, I'm not saying anything.

Peter Watts likely doesn't care much about humans evolving, but I would personally say that neither of those quotes suggest that humans will stop evolving unless they can behave "as one." The fact that certain animals and technologies have been shown to do so might mean that they have an evolutionary advantage, but it doesn't mean that humans will just stop being. As far as evolution's concerned, there is no "right" answer either. There's just what works, and what doesn't.

The more complex a network or system becomes, the more intelligent it appears (and who's to really draw the line between appearing intelligent and being intelligent). All Watts is saying is that as complex systems evolve, they will appear as intelligent as we are, if not more intelligent than we are. It has nothing to do with humans ceasing to evolve and everything to do with other species evolving exponentially.

 

[Einherjar86]

A bit of solemn pondering for the start of a new semester:

In any case, Brassier implies that Nietzsche isn’t sufficiently serious about science. Science is not just one among many perspectives, leaving us free to pick another that better suits our purpose. Science tells us the facts that obtain in the real world of objects. And that world is absolutely meaningless. In this regard, Brassier agrees with Lovecraft’s cosmicism: nature is perfectly indifferent to us and there’s no trace of us anywhere beyond our planet, so our anthropocentric metaphors are of no avail. Certainly, theism is obviously false in light of the objective nature of reality. After all, what is a world of objects? It’s physical, decomposable into mindlessly-ordered mechanisms, and in the case of our corner of the universe, it’s doomed to extinction. Even if nature is unified, in the sense that objects are caught up in interdependent processes, as indeed many physicists believe, we are limited creatures that come and go, just as our species will perish, as will all life left on Earth when our sun explodes. Brassier puts this latter point paradoxically, by saying that we should live as if this extinction had already happened—and indeed, had happened even before terrestrial life began. His point, I take it, is the fatalistic one that because our extinction is naturally inevitable, we ought to think of ourselves in terms of how nature treats us: we are nothing now because we’re sure to become nothing.

http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.com/2013/09/brassiers-nihilism-and-creation-of.html

 

[Dak]

Seems like a rather incompatible viewpoint contrasted to "we cannot know things in themselves". Science purports to do just that.

As far as that strain of fatalism goes, it's worse than pedantic Malthusianism. While all life left on earth might be eradicated upon massive solar disturbances of any sort, that doesn't change the value of the now in the now, nor does it alter possibilities of "escape" in some distant future.

Taking history at face value, we've gone from grubbing in the dirt and eating beating hearts to finding other potential earths scattered across the galaxy, in what registers as a relative second in the totality of time. What can we do with another 10k years? Estimates of the death of the sun far exceed that time in the future.

Going back to "value of the now in the now", the pleasure of today and tomorrow as experienced in socialization, education, sipping on some delicious coffee, and enjoying pleasing melodies is hardly negated because the sun is going to explode so far into the future that for comparison we barely understand that far into the past.

This is consistent with what I find to be the consistent shortcoming of a lot of Continental philosophy and it's derivatives: It's entirely unactionable, or if it happens to be actionable, only in a most negative sort of way. It's useful for maintaining a level of mental balance against "irrational exuberance" over any particular solution, but that's about it. This is not a defense of "meaning" vs nihilism on any sort of transcendent level - I readily submit a defense of meaning of the most "base" sort. I. I create my own meaning, even if it could be construed as purely reactionary/a posteriori. Nihilism has no argument for it's own value.

Edit:

Nihilism is just a name for the inner desolation left when we soberly acknowledge that the world can be explained without our anthropomorphic bells and whistles, that those who best understand the physical nature of things, in fact, are experts precisely in (temporarily) divesting themselves of their humanity, of engaging the world like unfeeling machines, handling exotic mathematical formulas that baffle the nakedly biased and emotional hoi palloi.

I see a fundamental contradiction here, if not multiple contradictions.

Brassier might call the meanings that make up culture “illusory” or “subjective,” but because these meanings are naturally produced by a parallel process of interaction between the world and some mental capacity, that belittling of meaning and normativity would strike me as arbitrary. The effects of the two interactions between mind and world are equally real.

To wit: If we are to dispense with distinctions between "organic" and "inorganic" or "natural" and ""unnatural", why doesn't this extend to our creations: If we are merely objects within nature, so are our rearrangement of objects. Objects-become-(new)objects. So if the cathedral(new object) is "illusory", so are it's unarranged parts(objects), yet Brassier does not assert this. The distinction is necessary for his argument, but it's incompatible with the whole of the nihilistic position.

 

[Einherjar86]

Good response. Unfortunately, I foresee my free time dwindling, so I probably won't be able to get on here as much; but I've been working all day, so I thought I'd try and post a response before the wife gets home.

Seems like a rather incompatible viewpoint contrasted to "we cannot know things in themselves". Science purports to do just that.

As far as that strain of fatalism goes, it's worse than pedantic Malthusianism. While all life left on earth might be eradicated upon massive solar disturbances of any sort, that doesn't change the value of the now in the now, nor does it alter possibilities of "escape" in some distant future.

Taking history at face value, we've gone from grubbing in the dirt and eating beating hearts to finding other potential earths scattered across the galaxy, in what registers as a relative second in the totality of time. What can we do with another 10k years? Estimates of the death of the sun far exceed that time in the future.

Going back to "value of the now in the now", the pleasure of today and tomorrow as experienced in socialization, education, sipping on some delicious coffee, and enjoying pleasing melodies is hardly negated because the sun is going to explode so far into the future that for comparison we barely understand that far into the past.

Brassier (and Meillassoux, coincidentally) are both concerned with the current state of philosophy, which they perceive as stagnant and mired in Kantian models of perception and knowledge. Value reduces, for Kant, to what knowledge (through consciousness and sensation) we can derive from the world, and this knowledge is necessarily limited. Brassier and Meillassoux are both interested in challenging that formulation of value, which relies (in large part) on the subject's relation to the world through sensory perception.

Our senses not only are inefficient in dealing with the whole of reality, but they also occasionally deceive us. This reduction of individual value to how we interpret what is around us through our senses troubles Brassier, I think, because we are unable to successfully judge what is around us. Brassier and Meillassoux are both strong proponents of the natural and physical sciences because they provide us with evolving means of assessing reality, whereas the human sensory apparatus remains mired in the same state it was during Kant's time. The retreat into "correlationism" (i.e. that all that matters is our perception of the world, or how it correlates to our consciousness) fails in the here and now because it is inadequate to deal with things-in-themselves.

This is consistent with what I find to be the consistent shortcoming of a lot of Continental philosophy and it's derivatives: It's entirely unactionable, or if it happens to be actionable, only in a most negative sort of way. It's useful for maintaining a level of mental balance against "irrational exuberance" over any particular solution, but that's about it. This is not a defense of "meaning" vs nihilism on any sort of transcendent level - I readily submit a defense of meaning of the most "base" sort. I. I create my own meaning, even if it could be construed as purely reactionary/a posteriori. Nihilism has no argument for it's own value.

Seen through the lens of Kantian correlationism, I would submit that any individual meaning ("I") is automatically insufficient and inadequate. This isn't necessarily the case (i.e. it doesn't have to be that way); but for the time being, it is. Brassier writes:

"Philosophers would do well to desist from issuing any further injunctions about the need to re-establish the meaningfulness of existence, the purposefulness of life, or mend the shattered concord between man and nature. Philosophy should be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem. Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity. Thinking has interests that do not coincide with those of the living..."

And here I would recall Nick Land's quote: "Thought is a function of the real, something that matter can do."

Freud's theory of the death drive is unavoidable here; if organisms operate - at a very basic, biological level - according to a principle by which their very origins are rooted in trauma, then perhaps the path an organism takes, whether painful, pleasurable, extended, abbreviated, isolated, or invasive, has less to do with subjective interests and much more to do with processes going down to the cellular level.

We've discussed the notion of consciousness before and how it justifies its own existence and value (to put it briefly); but this assumes a position of enjoyment for enjoyment's sake. We can experience pleasure, and thus have some evolutionary privilege to experience it and not to disallow others from experiencing it.

The presence of consciousness doesn't preclude the possibility that consciousness itself is nothing more than the evolutionary prosthesis, for lack of a better word, of a certain organism (i.e. a human) that accumulates and provides a very complex means to control the energies that it encounters. There is a way, I strongly believe, to think past death, to think past extinction, or to think prior to life itself. Both historic episodes present the same material fact: inorganic matter, which is basically all that "death" is.

The economy of the death-driven organism is terrifying because it presents the possibility of bodies that operate according to principles that do not accord with their consciousnesses. There is a strong argument, in my opinion, for ceasing to look at consciousness for consciousness's sake, and attempting to configure consciousness within a broader (posthuman) schema that speaks for inhuman, inorganic matter.

To wit: If we are to dispense with distinctions between "organic" and "inorganic" or "natural" and ""unnatural", why doesn't this extend to our creations: If we are merely objects within nature, so are our rearrangement of objects. Objects-become-(new)objects. So if the cathedral(new object) is "illusory", so are it's unarranged parts(objects), yet Brassier does not assert this. The distinction is necessary for his argument, but it's incompatible with the whole of the nihilistic position.

Brassier isn't saying that the composite parts that make up a cathedral are "illusory," or that the composed building is illusory; he's saying that the meaning attached to the building is illusory. Objects exist for Brassier, and I'm not sure how you're arriving at the conclusion that they don't, or that Brassier must assert that they don't.

Brassier claims that pure material objects exist - they definitely exist, science tells us they exist. The meanings that we ascribe to those objects do not exist, because - and here's the important part - living things do not exist. Life, as Brassier understands it, is a separate and illusory concept that human subjects ascribe to themselves and certain other objects.

Philosophy of life has grappled with this question for centuries; at our most basic, we are lifeless objects, made up of lifeless components. Even the parameters for what constitutes "life" are sketchy and questionable. Brassier insists that we can recontextualize our bodies as lifeless because, in fact, that is what they primarily are, and what they - or their components - will be for the vast majority of all time. Conscious life is not something special that was bestowed upon us, it is an evolutionary accident that likely serves some biological purpose... but it isn't something that exists for its own sake.

 

[rms]

I don't know where else to discuss this but I am interested in talking about it, did the Syria conflict pretty much dissolve because of the fear of US involvement? This is kind of a big deal to me, unless I am misinterpreting what is going on over there.

 

[Dak]

lolwut?

 

[rms]

?

 

[Einherjar86]

Why do you think it dissolved?

 

[Dak]

You are grossly misinformed about what is "going on over there" if you think the Syrian conflict has subsided in the least, much less dissolved. Secondly, any reduction in conflicts at this point would be a falling away of rebel *cough* Al Qaeda *cough* forces in response to a lack of "international support".

 

[rms]

Why do you think it dissolved?

I should say dissolved as an international involvement and not the civil war entirely, it seems that if they really give their chemical weapons to the UN committee then there from what i've read there is nothing we would be interested in pursuing.

You are grossly misinformed about what is "going on over there" if you think the Syrian conflict has subsided in the least, much less dissolved. Secondly, any reduction in conflicts at this point would be a falling away of rebel *cough* Al Qaeda *cough* forces in response to a lack of "international support".

Yeah I think I didn't put enough emphasis on what I meant as dissolved, internationally not domestically.

 

[Dak]

"I would say "resolved" then, rather than "dissolved". Of course, "strikes are still on the table", and so far all we have seen are some handshakes.

 

[Einherjar86]

I don't even think it's resolved internationally, since there's no guarantee that Putin will follow through with his proposed solution (which was actually Kerry's solution). I think people just got bored with it, which means the news got bored with it, which means they switch to something else. The media is a financial institution, so in a way, we dictate what they feed us.

And it definitely hasn't dissolved on the ground; but since Glenn Beck showed that atrocious video of a rebel eating someone else's heart, the backlash abroad has been even greater. It sickens me that clips like that come to stand for all Syrian rebels. We think we have such a good idea of who they are. Fucking Americans.

 

[Dak]

Of course it doesn't stand for all Syrian rebels any more than the bath salts "cannibal" stood for every guy on bath salts. Not really the point. Also, the primary issue, in my mind, is that why is the US spending money arming Al Qaeda (a significant portion of the "rebels") in Syria and Libya, but spending more in blood and treasure elsewhere fighting them? Not that I haven't already answered this for myself, but it's a glaring contradiction of purported purpose that people need to recognize.

 

[SentinelSlain]

Well there is an economy based around war, if you know what I mean, as well as a kind of societal justification of the government's authority that is somewhat dependant on there being a threat.

 

[rms]

"I would say "resolved" then, rather than "dissolved". Of course, "strikes are still on the table", and so far all we have seen are some handshakes.

I saw a story that a deal has been signed that if Syria follows a few guidelines there is no US intervention. Something like an inventory or all chemical weapons, UN inspectors in november and all weapons gone in 2014.

 

[Matt]

Unless Syria launches another chemical attack, it's 99% certain that no military action will be taken.

 

[Einherjar86]

Of course it doesn't stand for all Syrian rebels any more than the bath salts "cannibal" stood for every guy on bath salts. Not really the point. Also, the primary issue, in my mind, is that why is the US spending money arming Al Qaeda (a significant portion of the "rebels") in Syria and Libya, but spending more in blood and treasure elsewhere fighting them? Not that I haven't already answered this for myself, but it's a glaring contradiction of purported purpose that people need to recognize.

Well, it isn't the point (or "a" point) if you don't think that Glenn Beck holds substantial sway over a large percentage of the population (fact check: he does). An enormous part of the domestic backlash against "boots on the ground" was the flagrant anti-Islamic sentiments that ran rampant across the internet. I counted at least three posts of the video by people in my network, and I didn't bother counting the "likes" or reading the commentary.

You may not hold these same views, but I'm disgusted by the way in which "Islamophobia" played a part in determining what our response would be.