Dakryn's Batshit Theory of the Week

[Dak]

I have a skeptical side that wonders if our brains are merely making up what they purport to observe. That doesn't mean I discount the heat I feel when I hold my hand over an open flame.

Skepticism is always warranted, but these analyses aren't just collecting dust in hard drives. Simulations are increasingly important for producing usable models without the expense of toiling through a sufficient number of experiments or observations in the field. This isn't to say that the latter are obsolete, but that their correspondence to computer simulations (and vice versa) is ultimately useful for scientific study. Simulations aren't just making up what they purport to observe because their observations have, in many cases, been verified and validated.

If enough simulations are run, of course we should find one or another that correlates something with something at some point. This doesn't mean we can depend on it going forward, because we simply can't account for all the variables and even when we account for "error", we don't know the direction, location, or nature of the error.

 

[Einherjar86]

If enough simulations are run, of course we should find one or another that correlates something with something at some point. This doesn't mean we can depend on it going forward, because we simply can't account for all the variables and even when we account for "error", we don't know the direction, location, or nature of the error.

You can say the exact same thing about the human senses. The scientists who run simulations are likely very cognizant that the world isn't for us, and that simulated models will be in constant need of updating; but that's actually what simulation makes it easier to do. Imagine if we had to keep conducting real-world experiments in order to keep up with all these changing variables!

Your skepticism of simulated models needs to be extended to the human senses and subjective experience, otherwise you're being inconsistent. And at that point, in order to justify action you're basically falling back on what you've described in the past as a matter of practicality. With which I would agree, but I would say you need to extend the same courtesy to simulated models.

 

[Dak]

You can say the exact same thing about the human senses. The scientists who run simulations are likely very cognizant that the world isn't for us, and that simulated models will be in constant need of updating; but that's actually what simulation makes it easier to do. Imagine if we had to keep conducting real-world experiments in order to keep up with all these changing variables!

Your skepticism of simulated models needs to be extended to the human senses and subjective experience, otherwise you're being inconsistent. And at that point, in order to justify action you're basically falling back on what you've described in the past as a matter of practicality. With which I would agree, but I would say you need to extend the same courtesy to simulated models.

I'm privileging the senses only to the degree to they are the mediate for the simulations. In other words, the simulations are simulating from the simulation, if you wish to speak in that sort of language.

 

[The Ozzman]

the simulations are simulating from the simulation

 

[Einherjar86]

I'm privileging the senses only to the degree to they are the mediate for the simulations. In other words, the simulations are simulating from the simulation, if you wish to speak in that sort of language.

You're not being consistent on this, and you're digging into a well of pure skepticism that affords us nothing.

I could also say that your percept-image of the world is a simulation constructed by your brain and your senses, among other things. It runs internal models--in effect, it also "simulates from its own simulation" (and it does; the brain has been shown to weed out information that doesn't accord with prior internal models).

 

[Dak]

You're not being consistent on this, and you're digging into a well of pure skepticism that affords us nothing.

I could also say that your percept-image of the world is a simulation constructed by your brain and your senses, among other things. It runs internal models--in effect, it also "simulates from its own simulation" (and it does; the brain has been shown to weed out information that doesn't accord with prior internal models).

Sure, "top down processing" eliminates a lot of information that it finds irrelevant. I'm not saying simulations are entirely useless, but they have gotten far too much hype.

 

[Einherjar86]

Goddamnit, have you always been disagreeable for the sake of being disagreeable, or have I rubbed off on you too much?

 

[Dak]

Goddamnit, have you always been disagreeable for the sake of being disagreeable, or have I rubbed off on you too much?

Yes

 

[Einherjar86]

Well, I'm just going to backtrack and say that I don't have any anti-humanist qualms about the original FB post. My sensitivity to anthropocentrism derives methodological assumptions grounded in an elevation of human perceptivity or consciousness, not from the proposed stakes of scientific discoveries that might potentially yield benefits for humans. For me, the former is an epistemological matter; the latter is an ethical one.

 

[Dak]

Well, I'm just going to backtrack and say that I don't have any anti-humanist qualms about the original FB post. My sensitivity to anthropocentrism derives methodological assumptions grounded in an elevation of human perceptivity or consciousness, not from the proposed stakes of scientific discoveries that might potentially yield benefits for humans. For me, the former is an epistemological matter; the latter is an ethical one.

In all seriousness, I don't know how we can untangle ethics from everything else.

 

[Einherjar86]

I don't think we can.

 

[Einherjar86]

This is a decent piece, although, as always, the mistranslation of Derrida near the beginning is endlessly frustrating. But the rest on Foucault is pretty good. Nothing new, just a little homage.

https://aeon.co/essays/why-foucaults-work-on-power-is-more-important-than-ever

The exemplary manifestation of disciplinary power is the prison. For Foucault, the important thing about this institution, the most ubiquitous site of punishment in the modern world (but practically non-existent as a form of punishment before the 18th century), is not the way in which it locks up the criminal by force. This is the sovereign element that persists in modern prisons, and is fundamentally no different from the most archaic forms of sovereign power that exert violent force over the criminal, the exile, the slave and the captive. Foucault looked beyond this most obvious element in order to see more deeply into the elaborate institution of the prison. Why had the relatively inexpensive techniques of torture and death gradually given way over the course of modernity to the costly complex of the prison? Was it just, as we are wont to believe, because we all started to become more humanitarian in the 18th century? Foucault thought that such an explanation would be sure to miss the fundamental way in which power changes when spectacles of torture give way to labyrinthine prisons.

[...]

Foucault argued that if you look at the way in which prisons operate, that is, at their mechanics, it becomes evident that they are designed not so much to lock away criminals as to submit them to training rendering them docile. Prisons are first and foremost not houses of confinement but departments of correction. The crucial part of this institution is not the cage of the prison cell, but the routine of the timetables that govern the daily lives of prisoners. What disciplines prisoners is the supervised morning inspections, the monitored mealtimes, the work shifts, even the ‘free time’ overseen by a panoply of attendants including armed guards and clipboard-wielding psychologists.

Importantly, all of the elements of prison surveillance are continuously made visible. That is why his book’s French title Surveiller et punir, more literally ‘Surveil and Punish’, is important. Prisoners must be made to know that they are subject to continual oversight. The purpose of constant surveillance is not to scare prisoners who are thinking of escaping, but rather to compel them to regard themselves as subject to correction. From the moment of morning rise to night’s lights out, the prisoners are subject to ceaseless behavioural inspection.

And the prison model can be extended to the entirety of modern society, which is the implicit point. The structure of modern society compels us all to regard ourselves as subjects of observation, susceptible to correction at the hands of numerous apparatuses. Foucault called this the society of surveillance, which has since exploded, beginning right around the time Foucault was writing, into a global system of ubiquitous surveillance. This produces what Deleuze came to call the society of control. I find these different paradigms of vision and observation, and how they're institutionalized, absolutely fascinating.

 

[Dak]

I can see the parallels obviously, but it's important to note that the majority of prisons are ill-equipped to handle a mutiny. There's a tenuous agreement between the outnumbered guards and the prisoners, who have their own separate power structures that fill the prison and even connect with/extend to the outside.

 

[Einherjar86]

Yeah, I think that's true, and Foucault's research likely didn't cover the means/methods by which incarcerated kingpins manage their groups from inside. The concept of "discipline" doesn't cover physical violence though, which is one kind of power but not a disciplinary kind. In Foucault's definition, discipline is a form of nonviolent coercion, organized through various social institutions, to inculcate specific forms of behavior. Criminal organizations invoke their own forms of power, but they're not disciplinary in the sense of that prisons, schools, hospitals, etc. are.

It is important to note that Foucault's research focused on nineteenth-century institutions, and his argument is very much historical. He suggested that disciplinary measures are still used in our culture today, but more interesting (in my opinion) is Deleuze's articulation of the control society, which he never really expanded on, and only briefly wrote about in a short piece called "Postscript on Societies of Control." Deleuze basically agreed with Foucault but believed that a new element needed to be added to the disciplinary mix, and he termed it "control." Control doesn't rely explicitly on apparatuses of vision (like the panopticon, which Foucault used as a symbolic example), but rather a paradoxical ubiquity of vision, more aptly represented by (for example) big data, global communications, and other kinds of post-1945 technologies that developed largely out of World War Two.

 

[Dak]

One other point of contention, and this may be due to the datedness of the reference point for prisons, but that there is little to no "correction" work occurring in the modern prison system. Simply minutely regulating activity doesn't correct any particular antisocial behavior, and it may decrease overall personal discipline in many persons that have already demonstrated some lack of personal discipline.

 

[Einherjar86]

Sure, there certainly used to be corrective measures. Prisoners used to be forced to pray, attend lectures on the evils of alcoholism, perform hard labor, etc. With funding for federal prisons what it is, it's no wonder corrective punishment is on the wane.

But discipline is also a function of observation and subjectification. Institutions frame individuals as subject to correction, which in turn has the governmental advantage of making individuals see themselves as subjects susceptible to corrective measures. Foucault also talks about how good behavior is rewarded in a disciplinary institution, and this "double-system" is still at work in prisons today: i.e. prisoners are rewarded for good behavior, and are punished for bad behavior (they have a certain number of strikes, for instance, or they're put into solitary).

 

[Dak]

https://qz.com/911968/bill-gates-the-robot-that-takes-your-job-should-pay-taxes/

Robots are taking human jobs. But Bill Gates believes that governments should tax companies’ use of them, as a way to at least temporarily slow the spread of automation and to fund other types of employment.

Wonder how that will go over.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/breaking-faith/517785/?utm_source=twb

Maybe it’s the values of hierarchy, authority, and tradition that churches instill. Maybe religion builds habits and networks that help people better weather national traumas, and thus retain their faith that the system works. For whatever reason, secularization isn’t easing political conflict. It’s making American politics even more convulsive and zero-sum.

For years, political commentators dreamed that the culture war over religious morality that began in the 1960s and ’70s would fade. It has. And the more secular, more ferociously national and racial culture war that has followed is worse.

 

[Einherjar86]

https://qz.com/911968/bill-gates-the-robot-that-takes-your-job-should-pay-taxes/

Wonder how that will go over.

Well, robot ethics is an actual field. Obviously, in this case robots wouldn't be "paying taxes" themselves, the business-owners would be; and I'm sure that won't go over well at all, seeing as the shift to automation is for the purposes of cutting costs.

However, I have to think that taxing automation would be less expensive for employers than paying wages to individual employees, of whom it will take more to do what fewer robots could (probably) do. So if there's some concession to be made, perhaps it would actually be desirable...

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/breaking-faith/517785/?utm_source=twb[/QUOTE]

Establishing causation is difficult, but we know that culturally conservative white Americans who are disengaged from church experience less economic success and more family breakdown than those who remain connected, and they grow more pessimistic and resentful.

I read about this from a link on Facebook the other day. I think it makes sense.

The truth is, institutions like church and the military provide foundations for solidarity. Obviously, there are other communities that can do this (school, employment, family, etc.); but the modern disenchantment between personal religious belief and participation in a religious community do seem to correlate with poor social consequences.

Coincidentally, Frederic Jameson wrote back in the 1970s (in a piece called An American Utopia) that a utopian society should practice mandatory conscription because the military strips you of personal beliefs/commitments and molds you as part of a community--e.g. "we don't give a shit if you believe in Jesus or Mohammad, if you're Christian or Jewish," etc. I'm not sure this is true, but I was talking with someone whose brother is in the military now, and his experience seems to correspond to this (but maybe you have an opinion on this, Dak). At any rate, Jameson's ideas on Marxist praxis have always been a bit too Stalinist for my tastes, but it does go to support the argument for solidarity that derives from community participation of this kind.

 

[Dak]

Well, robot ethics is an actual field. Obviously, in this case robots wouldn't be "paying taxes" themselves, the business-owners would be; and I'm sure that won't go over well at all, seeing as the shift to automation is for the purposes of cutting costs.

However, I have to think that taxing automation would be less expensive for employers than paying wages to individual employees, of whom it will take more to do what fewer robots could (probably) do. So if there's some concession to be made, perhaps it would actually be desirable...

Maybe there could eventually be robots that can pay taxes . But yeah, I think instead of having "payroll" taxes you see something more in the direction of VATs that take into account production regardless of whether or not there is related payroll figures.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/breaking-faith/517785/?utm_source=twb

I read about this from a link on Facebook the other day. I think it makes sense.

The truth is, institutions like church and the military provide foundations for solidarity. Obviously, there are other communities that can do this (school, employment, family, etc.); but the modern disenchantment between personal religious belief and participation in a religious community do seem to correlate with poor social consequences.

Coincidentally, Frederic Jameson wrote back in the 1970s (in a piece called An American Utopia) that a utopian society should practice mandatory conscription because the military strips you of personal beliefs/commitments and molds you as part of a community--e.g. "we don't give a shit if you believe in Jesus or Mohammad, if you're Christian or Jewish," etc. I'm not sure this is true, but I was talking with someone whose brother is in the military now, and his experience seems to correspond to this (but maybe you have an opinion on this, Dak). At any rate, Jameson's ideas on Marxist praxis have always been a bit too Stalinist for my tastes, but it does go to support the argument for solidarity that derives from community participation of this kind.

Psych research into this sort of thing notes a few important components (for solidarity): Common experience (particularly if an unpleasant experience), shared goals (superordinate goals), and a common enemy. 19th and 20th century nation states did a pretty good job of hitting these (of course with lots of problems because of them as well), and the military - particularly a volunteer force - also does a good job of hitting these. Clear in groups and outgroups, with more or less concrete superordinate goals. Churches not only functioned as another type of ingroup, but generally supported the nation - giving it a moral veneer. From the end of the 20th century through today though, forces of globalism have tried to eliminate national groupings and arguably religiousity. There has been much success for the better part of 20+ years, but the problem is that when there are no outgroups, there is no ingroup either, and we see this atomization of the individual start doing serious social damage - and people will look for anything to create a new ingroup - and giving those new ingroups moral veneers.

Every so often the idea of 2 year mandatory public service commitments for 18 year olds is floated. I think, in practical terms, this is a much better idea than mandatory military participation. The military is for fighting wars. If you increase the size of the hammer, we are likely to go looking for nails moreso than we already do. But it won't do any good anyway if there's still this push to eliminate the nation state while at the same time using them. There's a high level of dissonance required to be dedicated to the ingroup known as America and also be pro-globalism, and dissonance is psychologically painful. The "international society" is going to have to come up with some other way to avoid constant war than the attempt to eliminate borders, cultures, etc.Unless we find some sort of unfriendly aliens which are technologically equivalent anyway.

 

[Dak]

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/20/are-liberals-on-the-wrong-side-of-history