Dakryn's Batshit Theory of the Week

[Dak]

If this is true, then it suggests that crime is crime in and of itself; crime is against the law because it is a crime. If you're considering crime in some specific way here that's going unspoken, then you need to be explicit about it.

I really hate to sound Humean here, but I will for the sake of brevity: The negative act to the person or property of another(s), however conceived even culturally, is generally unwelcome, even if accepted as a part of life. (IE, those who live in extremely "corrupt" cultures don't like it, but have just accepted it in the same way we accept income taxes). This does not make it any less criminal, even though it is not actively resisted, and maybe even legal.

The justification/argument for law enforcement derives from an entirely different set of legal precedents than that of organized crime.

I didn't really mean to tie the two together at all, that is, law enforcement and crime. The notion of crime as it pertains to breaking the law does not overlap perfectly with all those things which are "real crimes". For instance, the idea of a victimless crime (a victim other than the state) should be a contradiction, and instead is really a synonym for a particular variety of Foucault's "infractions".

While the very specific and particular justification behind one sort of strongman or another is different, in general both behavior and justification overlaps very closely.

Edit: @Jimmy I watched the web video, not sure what part you were referring to at the end.

 

[Jimmy... Dead.]

The part about the internet before books. I thought it was an interesting idea.

 

[Dak]

If we always only create our own stories, we are going to become fucking shallow people.

 

[Einherjar86]

Reading is a submissive process, but that doesn't mean it can't also be participatory. I'm not sure why those two notions are mutually exclusive for Johnson.

If we always only create our own stories, we are going to become fucking shallow people.

I don't think this is what Johnson means by creating our own narratives. He's referencing online discourse, which isn't reducible to a single person's narrative. He's talking about the combinatory narratives that emerge from millions of people engaging in discussion in an online space. Other critics refer to this as hypertext, and it's a growing field of study in the humanities.

 

[Dak]

So this is a narrative?

 

[Einherjar86]

Most certainly.

 

[Dak]

I always thought narratives needed a telos.

I don't know if this should be posted here or the Books thread, but I'm finally getting a moment to work on the Sense of Style, and barely a tenth of the way into the book he holds up examples from Jameson and Butler as terrible writing, and additionally that as a style it is "sludge....[which is easily acquired]", rather than the product of skill and toil.

 

[Einherjar86]

A narrative does need a "telos"; but endings are always constructed, never predetermined. Conclusions can change, they can evolve. And what about nonlinear narratives; what becomes of telos in this case? Narrative is a complex institution.

I would agree with Pinker about Butler. She's not a great writer. I would disagree about Jameson; there's a rhetorical purpose for, and flair to, his writing style.

I find it humorous (to a degree) that Pinker titled his book A Sense of Style. If he wanted to title it A Sense of Clarity, I might not mind; but style? Pinker isn't a judge of style, unfortunately. His writing might very well be clear, but he isn't a master or scholar of rhetorical engagement.

 

[Dak]

A Sense of Clarity

I got the mental image of an In Flames album

Well it certainly focuses on clarity for the most part, but not to the point of dispensing with all flourishes. One thing I find interesting is that he mostly bashes the passive voice, but that seems to be specifically what you are expected to write in for psych papers (I can't speak about other types of papers but I assume this holds in most academic fields). I'm not sure that I could, in my position of no standing, try to throw of the shackles of Academese. I must prove my ability to speak the jargon before dispensing with it.

 

[Einherjar86]

That does sound like In Flames...

I'm not sure about psych, but in literary scholarship the passive is to be used sparingly and tastefully (see what I did there?); the active voice should be dominant in literary academic writing. Many professional scholars fall victim to the passive. It isn't forbidden, and in some cases can give a more impressive air to your prose; but an overabundance of the passive can begin to sound monotonous and circuitous.

Academese isn't what most grad students write, it's what the infamous theorists like Butler and Baudrillard write. Professional scholarship can appeal to certain jargon, but there's a limit; making a reference to "Derridean iteration" or "Foucauldian power structures" requires no further explanation, provided your paper is directed at the appropriate audience.

 

[Einherjar86]

Read this in Peter Watts's most recent novel:

A neuron didn't know whether it fired in response to a scent or a symphony. Brain cells weren't intelligent; only brains were. And brain cells weren't even the lower limit. The origins of thought were buried so deep they predated multicellular life itself: neurotransmitters and choanoflagellates, potassium ion gates in Monosiga.

I am a colony of microbes talking to itself, Brüks reflected.

Now, I quote this passage for a very specific reason.

In our previous discussions, Dak has dismissed emergent complexity because of its mystical appearance; that is, because of its apparent reliance on something that cannot be proven to actually be there (emergent complexity itself). You have said that large-scale phenomena cannot be considered separately from their component parts, thus reducing every potential emergent phenomenon to the actors involved - namely, human actors.

However, if the urgent logical tendency is to attempt to redefine large-scale complexity as the mere appearance of individual actors, then it makes no sense to privilege conscious human beings as the primary source of energy in this case.

As Watts suggests, consciousness cannot be explained without recourse to neurons; but neurons themselves cannot be conscious. A single neuron doesn't understand English, for instance. However, it is certainly true that without neurons we would not have consciousness; so we agree that it is important to reduce the phenomenon to its components (at least to a degree).

However, in the scenario described above, consciousness would be the emergent phenomenon "explained away" via the reduction of brain processes to neurons. Yet we need conscious human agents in order to explain supra-complex phenomena such as linguistic communication, or traffic patterns, or aesthetics, etc. Without conscious human actors, we have nothing to reduce these "higher level" (for lack of a better term) phenomena to. So, for simplicity's sake, we will take three examples (neurons, conscious humans, and traffic patterns) and plot them on the following scale:

Neurons--------------Conscious humans---------------Traffic patterns

We cannot explain consciousness without neurons, certainly; but we cannot reduce consciousness to neuronal interaction because consciousness must be retained if we are to explain traffic patterns. We could reduce traffic patterns to neurons, but this rejects the existence of conscious human actors altogether (and ignores the possibility that neurons might be considered merely another example of complexity at a different scale).

My point is this: we must preserve the argument for emergent phenomena at least for one point of the system (i.e. the abstract possibility space we are considering - e.g. neurons, consciousness, traffic patterns) at all times. Consciousness itself can only be described as an emergent phenomenon of neuronal activity, and this emergent phenomenon is required in order to reduce (if we so choose) higher-level complexity down to the interactions between human agents. Like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, perhaps emergence will always imply a level or plane whose existence must be perceived as an emergent phenomenon in order to study complexity at various other levels. Just as we cannot know both the velocity and mass of a particle at the same moment, it would appear (I claim) that when assessing the complexity of various scales, certain levels must be taken for granted (i.e. understood in their emergent sense).

 

[Dak]

It appears to me that this comparison is an equivocation. Most basically, a snarled mass of cars doesn't have the telos of reproduction or survival that the cells, microbes, DNA, etc that make up at least "the body". Surely cells or bacteria don't consciously pursue this, but a traffic jam neither consciously nor unconsciously pursues anything. In fact, once a person finds his or herself in a jam, they want out. Our cells and microbes are not jumping ship, as it were.

Trying to compare a traffic jam to consciousness appears to be a 21st century remake of Paley's Watch theory.

 

[Einherjar86]

You're denying the argument based on what people want (i.e. to get out of a traffic jam), not what people do (i.e. get into traffic jams). Cells don't want to reproduce or survive; that's a projection of consciousness onto cells, which is exactly what we cannot do. Cells simply do reproduce, which results in the phenomenon of consciousness. Likewise, drivers simply do keep driving, resulting in the phenomenon of traffic patterns. You have to get away from this tendency to infuse intention into things.

 

[Dak]

I thought mentioning "not consciously" covered an acknowledgement that it isn't intentional in the way my typing this response is intentional. Again, comparing the more or less copy/paste mechanical processes of cells to the complexity of drivers in and around any given traffic jam appears to be equivocation.

 

[Einherjar86]

You are the one who said in your initial response that once people are in a traffic jam, "they want out." This insists on a difference in kind (i.e. consciousness) between cells and human actors; but my point is that this distinction is irrelevant since we aren't concerned with what humans want to do. We're simply concerned with what they do. At the level of a traffic jam, human consciousness plays no role; just the same as, at the level of consciousness, any hypothetical intention of a neuron would be irrelevant. Consciousness can certainly accompany human action, but it makes no sense to refer to conscious will or desire of human actors when discussing higher-level phenomena, since these components of consciousness have no effect on the higher-level phenomena. All we are concerning ourselves with is behavior, not any kind of internal intention.

I'm not trying to say that traffic jams are conscious or anything like that; I'm saying traffic jams can be looked at as emergent phenomena, just like consciousness albeit at a different level. Consciousness is not the point of this discussion. My point in mentioning it was that you continue to want to reduce complex phenomena "above" us (for lack of a better term) back down to conscious human actors; but I'm saying that this is an arbitrary center of action since we could then just as easily reduce consciousness down to neuronal energy.

Saying that the comparison "appears" to be an equivocation isn't substantive.

 

[Dak]

Isn't this then merely (part of) the hard problem of consciousness? Consciousness is in fact not arbitrary, however badly one might wish it to be. Assuming that consciousness is reducible to cellular/microbial/hormonal/etc/etc arrangement and interplay, I still see no basis for parallel here to traffic jam. If you really just want to parallel purely for justifying emergence, this analogy appears to weaken rather than strengthen the idea.

More importantly though: Dismissing conscious human behavior as unimportant when speaking of productions of (or largely due to) conscious human behavior seems like the sort of thinking while planning which leads problems such as traffic jams. Next door neighbor to blank slate theory in the creation of man-made trials and tribulations of the human experience.

 

[Einherjar86]

The hard problem of consciousness is its own issue. Emergence participates in that discussion, but it isn't the central concern of emergence.

I'm not sure what you mean by consciousness being arbitrary. It certainly isn't necessary, so... you might have to explain that.

The parallel to a traffic jam makes sense, you just have to consider the effects from a different perspective. All we're saying is that from the vantage point of a traffic jam, in which humans play a part, it makes no sense to appeal to them as conscious agents - all that matters is the movements of these little parts, which function much like nodes in a network. Out of all these movements, combined into a larger structure, we witness effects that do not derive from merely a single vehicle, or driver.

No one is saying that by accepting emergence we suddenly have no use for the conscious human subject. That isn't what's being argued at all, yet it seems as though you're reacting violently to this imaginary implication. Emergence doesn't explain consciousness away; it re-configures the framework of the discussion so as to make a material connection between consciousness as an epiphenomenon and neuronal behavior as a first-order phenomenon. Single neurons don't speak a language, but interactively they produce an effect of meaning between linguistic agents. There's a material relationship here and emergence attempts to understand that material relationship. Likewise, a single car-driver doesn't make another car driver miles behind him late to work; there's a material relationship between the parts and the whole that results in the whole producing effects beyond the parts.

I'm going to ignore the second portion of your response; it's little more than free associative thinking that bears no substantive relation to the discussion at hand.

 

[Dak]

The hard problem of consciousness is its own issue. Emergence participates in that discussion, but it isn't the central concern of emergence.

I'm not sure what you mean by consciousness being arbitrary. It certainly isn't necessary, so... you might have to explain that.

It isn't arbitrary. Whether or not it is necessary, it is "here", has effects, etc. You can't reduce a given traffic jam down entirely to (conscious) human action, but it plays the primary role, both in understanding the jam and in understanding how to prevent them. To address traffic jams beyond going "there is a traffic jam" absolutely requires addressing the conscious human actors, and to repeat, this is not arbitrary.

I think it might appear arbitrary because you want to posit the counterfactual right along with the factual. A traffic jam of robots serving the needs of robots serving the needs of robots ad infinitum could occur at some point, but why should we care about this future or counterfactual devoid of humans when we have actual human traffic jams to deal with? Might as well speak of unicorn traffic jams for all the import it has. I know you didn't bring this up here specifically, but it has been brought up in some ways in the past, and I'm mentioning it as a reason for my privileging of an anthropocentric perspective.

The parallel to a traffic jam makes sense, you just have to consider the effects from a different perspective. All we're saying is that from the vantage point of a traffic jam, in which humans play a part, it makes no sense to appeal to them as conscious agents - all that matters is the movements of these little parts, which function much like nodes in a network. Out of all these movements, combined into a larger structure, we witness effects that do not derive from merely a single vehicle, or driver.

Of course, one driver a traffic jam does not make. And you can talk about the effects of traffic jams without an entire tally of all participating factors to go along with it. But that is impact, rather than telling you about the traffic jam. But, to specifically address "emergence", how can you say that a traffic jam isn't the sum of it's parts? If you remove one car, it's now 1 car less jammed. You keep removing cars and it remains a jam. At some point, the last car necessary for a jam is removed and now we have no more jam. Add the car back and now we have a jam again, of which all cars before that one are a part of. The jam is still the sum of the cars (and lane width/numbers/etc/etc).

There's a material relationship here and emergence attempts to understand that material relationship. Likewise, a single car-driver doesn't make another car driver miles behind him late to work; there's a material relationship between the parts and the whole that results in the whole producing effects beyond the parts.

This is the problem with comparing a traffic jam to consciousness to try and prove emergence as neither redundant nor mysterious: To speak of a traffic jam as having emergent properties we must (at least) speak of any case of overflowing as some "amazing" case of emergent phenomena. Forgot to turn off the water in the tub? Emergence. One too many m&Ms in the bowl? Emergence. Etc. Other than the fact that water or M&Ms literally emerge from the overtaxed container, I don't see how emergence has a non-redundant quality in the "traffic jam" case. It has no new explanatory power. Conversely, it looks "mysterious" in reference to consciousness.....and if not then redundant again.

My objection to ignoring consciousness in terms of traffic jams is purely in reference to any treatment of traffic jams, that is, trying to solve the problem of traffic jams without looking first at the conscious human actors in them. Even if the problem is most easily solved by adding lanes or improving stop lights or some other solution besides merely reducing the number of actors, this still is based on the actors.

I'm going to ignore the second portion of your response; it's little more than free associative thinking that bears no substantive relation to the discussion at hand.

Implications are "free associative thinking"? I don't think so. Either way, implications are absolutely substiantially relational. If a particular methodology compounds and creates error, or a new one imitates/approximates one that has been shown to create and compound error, then this should raise red flags to the heavens.

 

[Einherjar86]

It isn't arbitrary. Whether or not it is necessary, it is "here", has effects, etc. You can't reduce a given traffic jam down entirely to (conscious) human action, but it plays the primary role, both in understanding the jam and in understanding how to prevent them. To address traffic jams beyond going "there is a traffic jam" absolutely requires addressing the conscious human actors, and to repeat, this is not arbitrary.

First, I don't understand how you're using arbitrary; and I think you're using it incorrectly. Butterflies are here and have effects (pun intended), but they are still arbitrary. They could just as easily not exist.

Second, consciousness doesn't play the primary role from the perspective of the jam itself. You're not thinking like an emergentist.

I think it might appear arbitrary because you want to posit the counterfactual right along with the factual. A traffic jam of robots serving the needs of robots serving the needs of robots ad infinitum could occur at some point, but why should we care about this future or counterfactual devoid of humans when we have actual human traffic jams to deal with? Might as well speak of unicorn traffic jams for all the import it has. I know you didn't bring this up here specifically, but it has been brought up in some ways in the past, and I'm mentioning it as a reason for my privileging of an anthropocentric perspective.

Who is participating in the traffic jam doesn't matter. There's nothing necessary about it. If humans ceased to exist, so would traffic jams. If temperature gradients ceased to exist, so would weather patterns. If neurons ceased to exist, so would consciousness. I'm talking about altering our perspectives. The availability of raw material for conscious perception doesn't preclude the possibility that other various objects interact in such ways as to produce complex phenomena at higher levels. In this model, consciousness is an entirely arbitrary starting point.

Of course, one driver a traffic jam does not make. And you can talk about the effects of traffic jams without an entire tally of all participating factors to go along with it. But that is impact, rather than telling you about the traffic jam. But, to specifically address "emergence", how can you say that a traffic jam isn't the sum of it's parts? If you remove one car, it's now 1 car less jammed. You keep removing cars and it remains a jam. At some point, the last car necessary for a jam is removed and now we have no more jam. Add the car back and now we have a jam again, of which all cars before that one are a part of. The jam is still the sum of the cars (and lane width/numbers/etc/etc).

Remove one car and it's one car less; but the large-scale effects can still occur. At some point, if you remove enough vehicles, the emergent effects will dissipate. But the point is, at a certain level, the effects persist despite the removal of a single vehicle. The study of these effects need not take into consideration the removal or alteration of just one component.

This is the problem with comparing a traffic jam to consciousness to try and prove emergence as neither redundant nor mysterious: To speak of a traffic jam as having emergent properties we must (at least) speak of any case of overflowing as some "amazing" case of emergent phenomena. Forgot to turn off the water in the tub? Emergence. One too many m&Ms in the bowl? Emergence. Etc. Other than the fact that water or M&Ms literally emerge from the overtaxed container, I don't see how emergence has a non-redundant quality in the "traffic jam" case. It has no new explanatory power. Conversely, it looks "mysterious" in reference to consciousness.....and if not then redundant again.

I don't think you understand. There's nothing amazing or mysterious about emergence. It's only a model for understanding various complex systems. Your examples are juvenile, no offense. Emergence, with regard to traffic patterns, has explanatory power for talking about things like pollution, temperature differentiation, the price of fuel, etc. None of this requires us to look at the personal views or ideas of a single driver. The fact that the solution to these problems might lie in human consciousness doesn't matter; we're simply discussing the movement of energies that contribute to various phenomena.

My objection to ignoring consciousness in terms of traffic jams is purely in reference to any treatment of traffic jams, that is, trying to solve the problem of traffic jams without looking first at the conscious human actors in them. Even if the problem is most easily solved by adding lanes or improving stop lights or some other solution besides merely reducing the number of actors, this still is based on the actors.

And if those changes are made, then the phenomena will change. This doesn't mean that consciousness plays a role in the materiality of the effects themselves. We can still talk about these effects and think about them despite saying that they operate at a level of conditions in which consciousness doesn't have much influence.

Implications are "free associative thinking"? I don't think so. Either way, implications are absolutely substiantially relational. If a particular methodology compounds and creates error, or a new one imitates/approximates one that has been shown to create and compound error, then this should raise red flags to the heavens.

They're incorrect implications, which is why I dismissed the comment.

 

[Dak]

First, I don't understand how you're using arbitrary; and I think you're using it incorrectly. Butterflies are here and have effects (pun intended), but they are still arbitrary. They could just as easily not exist.

Second, consciousness doesn't play the primary role from the perspective of the jam itself. You're not thinking like an emergentist.

Sounds like anthropomorphizing.

Who is participating in the traffic jam doesn't matter. There's nothing necessary about it. If humans ceased to exist, so would traffic jams. If temperature gradients ceased to exist, so would weather patterns. If neurons ceased to exist, so would consciousness. I'm talking about altering our perspectives. The availability of raw material for conscious perception doesn't preclude the possibility that other various objects interact in such ways as to produce complex phenomena at higher levels. In this model, consciousness is an entirely arbitrary starting point.

Just because something isn't necessary doesn't mean it is arbitrary. Contingent is usually used in contrast to necessary. Arbitrary indicates random/not based on anything. Privileging consciousness in describing human action (or subconscious even) is not arbitrary.

Of course, I wouldn't deny that various things interact in ways that to produce complex phenomena that have higher level effects, but I don't see how this requires accepting emergence - or if it does it doesn't change anything.

Remove one car and it's one car less; but the large-scale effects can still occur. At some point, if you remove enough vehicles, the emergent effects will dissipate. But the point is, at a certain level, the effects persist despite the removal of a single vehicle. The study of these effects need not take into consideration the removal or alteration of just one component.

I don't think you understand. There's nothing amazing or mysterious about emergence. It's only a model for understanding various complex systems. Your examples are juvenile, no offense. Emergence, with regard to traffic patterns, has explanatory power for talking about things like pollution, temperature differentiation, the price of fuel, etc. None of this requires us to look at the personal views or ideas of a single driver. The fact that the solution to these problems might lie in human consciousness doesn't matter; we're simply discussing the movement of energies that contribute to various phenomena.


And if those changes are made, then the phenomena will change. This doesn't mean that consciousness plays a role in the materiality of the effects themselves. We can still talk about these effects and think about them despite saying that they operate at a level of conditions in which consciousness doesn't have much influence.

How does emergence have more/better explanatory power for, say, the pollution caused by the traffic jam, compared to prior to the emergent model? This is what I want clarified before emergence appears non-redundant.

The examples were intentionally juvenile to prove that complexity can confuse the basics. Traffic jams occur in the very general sense due to the same reason that containers overflow. Too much in too little space. What is the difference between too many M&Ms and too many cars?

They're incorrect implications, which is why I dismissed the comment.

Let's say we are interested in reducing pollution. So then we target traffic jams as a significant producer of pollution. Can we just treat "traffic jams"? Maybe we just see the cars in the jam as the "nodes" as it were. How do we deal with the nodes? Eventually you run down into consciousness - and don't have to go further (down). We don't need to address the atp conversion process to understand traffic jams.