things, about stuff

a change of pace

2011-07-08T15:16:00.000-07:00

So I started this blog forever ago, and then never did anything with it. I presume I still won't do much with it. However, the time (summer) has come for me to at least pretend I'm going to do something with it.

For starters, a life update. About a month ago, I graduated with a BS in Symbolic Systems from Stanford. For those of you who don't know what SymSys is, it's a study of the way in which information, encoded in symbols, can be organized in to systems. This ranges (moving up the abstraction layer from artificial systems to natural systems) from a study of formal logic to algorithms to artificial intelligence to human-computer interaction to linguistics and cognitive science.

Nowadays, I work as an intern at Mozilla Labs. In Labs, I work on the boundary between Applications and Identity. Specifically, I am building the architecture which will allow for creating a social stream out of your application usage, and then using this stream to build an App Store with strong social aspects.

I still play in a band called The Sea People, and we're doing pretty well. Finishing up our first album, which we'll release slowly over the summer and then as a whole in the fall. Definitely check out the first two tracks, linked right above.

Moving forward, I'm going to be blogging about my work in Labs, and other such hackish/design things. I also, inevitably, will write about politics... although, like most every person between the ages of 20 and 30, I must admit my teeth have rather fallen out of late.

So yeah! Stay tuned for some inside digs about the future of the internet, the world of web design, links to some great music, and the occasional political outburst.

Erin McKeown plays "All That Time You Missed" live at Stanford

2009-11-19T20:50:00.001-08:00

Erin McKeown plays All that Time You Missed live at the CoHo at Stanford Univeristy

The post wherein the blogger apologizes for his lack of updates

2009-09-04T01:52:00.001-07:00

Really? This is what I’m doing?

Maybe this is more like a “I’ve posted hella academic writings the past 100000 posts, maybe I should be a little more personal” sorta thing. I hope that’s what it is.

Anyway, I just finished up my internship for the Stanford Symbolic Systems Program. I was a research assistant, looking into a bunch of psycholinguistic stuff. I’ll be giving a short talk on it soon, so I’ll post a general notes/script for that talk here soon. Maybe even a video! Blogs don’t have to be just words? Crazy!

I’m home now, go back out in around 2 weeks to start the Autumn Quarter of my Junior year. Should be fun!

Anyway, I swear I’ll post a real update in the next couple of days.

--dK

Just joined 8tracks

2009-08-12T15:45:00.001-07:00

Cool site, just posted my first mix. Listen here or head over to http://8tracks.com/21echoes/indie-prog-folk

The Rationality of Irrationality: Terrorism and the Bargaining Model of International Relations

2009-08-10T16:30:00.001-07:00

In examining theoretical models of war, one consistently finds oneself adding the caveat “assuming, of course, that the two entities are acting completely rationally”. It is theory, after all, and all high-level theories must utilize moderate heuristics. Anyway, this caveat seems sensible in classical models of war: the players in question are very large communities in which most radical and irrational elements are removed from the mainstream public discourse, allowing cooler heads to prevail. What, then, is to be done when those radical elements band together (or potentially remain individual) and wish to see their views realized? Can any of the same theories be applied, or must a new archetype be constructed from scratch?

We begin with one of the now standard international relations models, the bargaining equation. In the bargaining equation, each country looks at an equation where the probability of winning multiplied by the winning payoff is added to the probability of loss multiplied by the losing payoff, from all of which the cost of fighting is subtracted. Any bargain which pays off greater than this value is worthwhile to the countries, and there is significant overlap in acceptable values due the cost of fighting lowering the payoff floor. However, this model only works when the two countries are fighting over a divisible prize, are accurately confident in their military power, have no significant threat to reputation at stake, there are no significant benefits of preemptive strikes, and leaders are not tempted to break promises. And, of course, the ever-present presumption of rational behavior by a country’s leader is again a necessary caveat.

If we can envision a terrorist organization that fits these 6 qualifications, there would seem to be no evident reason that they could not follow the bargaining equation to make international and intranational relations decisions. Indeed, some of these qualifications could be weakened (indivisible prizes being especially relevant to Islamic extremist terrorists) and the use of terror could remain a viable strategy within the bargain equation framework. How would this work, then? As David A. Lake proposes in his article “Rational Extremism: Understanding Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century”, a simple explanation for the functional possibilities of terrorism can be modeled as a “baiting tactic”, in which a small organization can provoke, through inexpensive terror actions, a massive and disorganized retaliatory effort by the victim country against the populus in which the terrorist organization resides, radicalizing the citizenry to the terrorist’s cause. In this way, the terrorist can improve their bargaining power by commanding more personnel, and eventually may have the ability to see their goals realized.

Key to this provocation of full-scale retaliation is creating the perception that the organization is irrational, and prone to surprise attack of civilians, thus causing the label “terrorist”. By seeming unhinged to the target nation, they cause the public to demand complete obliteration of the organization at any cost. As is explaned in Robert Pape’s article “The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism” and in Scott Atran’s “Genesis of Suicide Terrorism”, the recent rise of suicide terrorism has a number of contributing factors, which play into this concept of seeming irrational and excessively extremist. Suicide bombings also provoke the invading nation to view the region as more unstable, and desire to pull their troops out as soon as possible to wash their hands of the instability, allowing the organization increased control of the region when the power vacuum is created.

Overall, it is not too far of a leap to fit terrorist organizations into our prior models of international relations when abstracted to a significant degree. However, it is important to remove prior assumptions about deterrence and other international bargaining techniques when dealing with such organizations, as many have to be completely altered to even begin to apply.

Justice as Heuristic: A Cognitive Evolutionary Approach to Utilitarian Justice Models

2009-08-09T00:36:00.001-07:00

There is a central question at the heart of both politics and psychology: What makes us do the things we do? Psychology is interested in this question in and of itself, as a disciplinary objective. Political Science, however, seeks to use the answer to this question in its larger aims of studying the possible structures of society, along with their potential costs and benefits. Now, to answer this question in a paper as short as this would be absurd. However, I intend to use the specific case study of Justice and Utilitarianism as a synecdoche, a lens through which to view the entire issue. Specifically, in this paper I will investigate the supposed problems which a sense of Justice presents to the overall philosophy of Utilitarianism. In response to these issues, I will construct an argument for interpreting Justice as a moral heuristic.

To begin, we must first define the terms of the discussion—Utilitarianism and Justice. Utilitarianism I will define as follows: Government-sponsored “Normative Egoistic Hedonism”. Utilitarianism is “Normative” because the philosophy makes claims about what actions people should do. It is “Egoistic” because (in its original formulation by Jeremy Bentham) a person is interested predominantly in his or her own condition. “Hedonism” is used because the ultimate aim of the philosophy is happiness, or “utility”, from which the term “Utilitarianism” comes. As Bentham put it, “By utility is meant that property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness (all this in the present case comes to the same thing)” (18). It is “government-sponsored” in the sense that while standard individual Utilitarianism takes only the individual into account, a government must take all individuals under consideration equally in its decision making process.[1] So, to rephrase the theory, it is simply that each person should do that which causes “the greatest good for the greatest number of people”, or “that principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question” (18). In this way, Utilitarianism is a consequentialist moral theory, wherein each action is judged on the basis of the net change it affects in utility rather than on the action in and of itself.[2]

However, judging actions solely by their consequences seems to cause a number of problems. Specifically, in many situations the actions seemingly prescribed by Utilitarianism go against our moral intuitions. Something, we feel, is simply being left out of the “felicific calculus”[3] of adding up the net pleasures enacted upon all affected parties. One commonly cited hypothetical example is when a homeless person wanders into a hospital ward. At that time, there are a number of people in the hospital waiting on organ donations, which are extremely difficult to come by, and without which they would die. From a Utilitarian perspective, killing the homeless individual and donating his organs to the numerous people waiting would certainly increase net utility. A more contemporary (and thus more realistically nuanced) example is that of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” currently being debated throughout the media and political spheres. Through the information garnered via the torture of one individual, one could potentially avert catastrophic consequences (terrorism, war actions, etc.).[4] These situations, however, all end up boiling down to around the same thing: Is it worth the suffering of one to save many?

To confront this dilemma, Mill revises Bentham’s original formulation of Act Utilitarianism to become Rule Utilitarianism. By this it is meant that Bentham believes that each individual act be judged on its net change in utility, while Mill believes that there can be rules formulated, which are judged on the extent to which following their demands enacts the greatest net utility. Rules which would resolve the apparent contradiction between our feeling of Justice and the surface Utilitarian decision in the cases cited earlier would be “do not kill innocents” and “do not torture”, respectively.

Of course, these rules are extremely broad. Should we make them more specific? Many moral philosophers have taken this as a significant flaw in Rule Utilitarianism: why can we not simply make each rule slightly more detailed by adding an unending list of situational exceptions wherein following the exception would increase net utility? Or, to go even broader, why can the rule formulated not simply be “act as an act utilitarian”? The answer to these two questions lies in the field of cognitive science.

Humans, while being ostensibly the smartest animals, still have major deficits in cognitive ability. We make significant errors daily, in fields as varied as philosophy, mathematics, physics, music, and history. We simply don’t have the memory or computational power to get everything right all the time. Most importantly, however, we don’t need to. Surely, in the basic tasks of eating, sleeping, walking, and procreating, we’re all pretty much competent. These traits are necessary to our survival and continuance as a species, and any persons who could not perform them quickly disappeared from the gene pool. As mankind developed technologies, however, a new set of needs was invented—abstract manipulation of concepts. The field was entirely alien to us as a species, and to this day we have not sufficiently evolved to cope with its requirements.

What we have developed, however, are little rules or problem-solving strategies (commonly known as heuristics). Heuristics are cognitive “short-cuts” by which our brains simplify the external world to more easily manipulable problems. They allow for quick, rough processing of information—the sort of work which the fast-paced, dog-eat-dog world of survival of the fittest requires. In doing so, they leave out much of the subtlety of the actual problem, fill in missing data, and extrapolate from past experience to attempt to solve the problem sufficiently and quickly.

One can assume that human beings developed heuristics because they were mechanisms which maximized reproductive success (a whole other sense of “utility”). Those human beings which could not problem solve well could not interact with the world in complex manners and would have less productive and secure societies, which would drive down an entire society’s reproductive success. As for why heuristics would develop rather than a complete-information-processing approach, one must recognize that the more and more one can reduce the cognitive load an actor must process to come to a decision, the more reasonably such an actor could actually act upon a decision. We simply don’t have the time (individually or evolutionarily) ability to gather every piece of information which relates to the potential utility of each decision we make.[5]

Applying this line of thought to the sociopolitical sphere, one can also assume that humans would develop moral heuristics to make quick social interaction decisions. In the same way that problem-solving heuristics evolved because they maximized our ability to interact with complex and abstract dilemmas brought about by new technologies, moral heuristics became increasingly important as humans developed into social animals involved in larger and larger societal networks. These new environments put new evolutionary pressures on humans, and those who could effectively make decisions which benefited the group as a whole (i.e., increase net utility) increased the group’s health, wealth, and security against other, competing societies. [6] These sets of moral heuristics which were selected for over the course of human history (because they increased utility) are what now constitute our feeling of Justice.

Reconciling Utilitarianism with Justice, then, is relatively simple. To do full-on Act Utilitarianism requires a complete calculation of how each decision we make would impact every other person’s happiness. So, like other problems, we must account for the unknown present and future via educated guesswork, aka heuristic. While Utilitarianism calls on us to use our cognitive, near-mathematical heuristics to make a decision, our brains already provide us with a quick moral heuristic solution—do whatever action does not violate our conception of Justice.

Revisiting those two cases from earlier, we can see how our moral heuristics interact with the Utilitarian moral philosophy. While I would not begin to suppose that the heuristics would be formulated precisely as I have in this paper, those Utilitarian Rules postulated earlier (“do not kill innocents” and “do not torture”) would almost certainly have analogues in our subconscious decision-making system, manifesting themselves consciously as a sick feeling in our gut that something is simply wrong with the decision. This feeling of Justice, we must remember, is not actually at odds with Utilitarianism as a moral philosophy—it is simply a short-cut, a way to rely on instincts which have built up in our genome rather than do full Utilitarian calculations every time. The very feelings themselves are based evolutionarily on the utility measure of increased reproductive success.

In this way, we can see the ways in which evolution, both social and psychological, can have huge impacts on political philosophy and practice. It does so mainly by its standard biological maxims: regardless of whatever may be “right” or “wrong” (if those terms can even be said to have any meaning), organisms end up doing that which maximizes their reproductive output. On a sociopolitical level, this most commonly ends up being that which allows one societal structure to overtake, defeat, and eliminate another, often by out-producing goods and maximizing market utility until it begins to negatively affect other key factors within that society (health, happiness, and reproductive success). This is nature’s Utilitarian Philosophy, and the final test of all moral and political philosophies we can ever come up with.

--David Kettler

[1] This final clause makes this formulation more accurately described as ‘universal utilitarianism’, which the vast majority of utilitarian political philosophers are. Technically speaking, Bentham first builds up his principle of utility as a decision to be made in a more “selfish” manner, judging actions by their effects on “the person in question”. He then considers government policy, and states “A measure of government [...] may be said to be conformable to or dictated by the principle of utility, when in like manner the tendency which it has to augment the happiness of the community is greater than any which it has to diminish it” (19).

[2] Those moral theories which judge the actions in and of themselves, regardless of the consequences, are called deontological theories.

[3] This term is now used to describe Bentham’s process of calculating utility, detailed on pp. 42-43

[4] The validity of information garnered via torture is, of course, extremely suspect for a number of reasons, but we will ignore this debate for the sake of argument.

[5] For a more complete discussion of how heuristics would evolve, see “Visions of Rationality” by Valerie M. Chase, Ralph Hertwig, and Gerg Gigerenzer.

[6] For a more technical discussion of the intersection of evolutionary biology, psychology, game theory, and social custom, see The Moral Animal by Robert Wright

The Question of Innate: How ambivalent terminology has bucketed a spectrum

2009-08-04T20:38:00.001-07:00

A preliminary mapping of my thoughts on the Nativism vs. Empiricism debate:

-----------

Philosophers and psychologists have debated the “innateness” of knowledge since Plato’s Meno dialogues. Locke, Leibniz, Hume, and many others continued the discussion, but most all avoided the question of the nativity of language to the human mind. However, as the science of Linguistics came into its own, the question reared its ugly head in this new discipline quite strongly. One of the founding papers of modern linguistics was Chomsky’s rejection of empiricist models of language acquisition. Chomsky’s ideas held sway for a few decades, but soon the connectionist model began to slowly chip away at Nativism’s dominance of linguistic thought, and we now sit between the two sides. The debate spans a wide range of topics, but I would rather take a broad look at how each side’s definition and conception of what constitutes “innate” plays an extremely significant role in their viewpoint, and how clarifying this ambiguity can collapse many issues. Specifically, I wish to take an evolutionary view as to why a certain level of “innateness” in language acquisition, cognition, and performance is absolutely certain, but why too strong a view of Nativism is, at best, highly unlikely, and at worst, absurd.

If there is one aspect of the human experience which makes it human, it would be mankind’s social nature. Certainly, other animals have tribes, packs, flocks, and families, but no animal can even begin to compete with mankind’s mastery of the social sphere. To achieve such a level of co-dependence, humans have come a long way, through hunter-gatherer tribes, agriculture chiefdoms, city states, empires, monarchies, up to the modern state. Assisting these sociopolitical transitions was a wealth of human ingenuity and technology: farming, metal weapons, navigational systems, currencies, markets, and industry. But for any decently sized society to work, before these technologies could be implemented, the members must communicate. Agreements must be made--contracts and peace treaties are the life-blood of intra- and inter-state functionality. Even prior to this, hunter gatherers must coordinate hunting strategies, tribe hierarchies, and more.

Essentially, as human technological and social ingenuity pushed for greater and greater levels of co-dependence and interaction, language filled the all-important role of coordinating activity and agreements. Those who could communicate could take part in the new advances. Those who could not were left behind. This natural selection worked (and works) on both an individual level—those individuals who cannot join the social circle of language will be relegated to those low-level roles which prevent them from sharing in the lion’s share of the spoils of non-zero sum interaction—and a societal level—those societies which do not have developed languages cannot coordinate activity, cannot develop large-scale social technologies, and will inevitably be eliminated by those societies which can fully harness the gains of social interaction (via assimilation or conquest).

As such, humans had huge genetic pressures to be predisposed to language acquisition and production. These millennia of social evolution have allowed all of us to be incredibly adept at the primary technology of the human experience. And this observation, in my opinion, is what is at the heart of the Nativist belief that language is “innate”. Seeing the vast majority of children who are so incredibly proficient leads them to believe that there is some knowledge “written” into a child’s brain—some “Universal Grammar”, and all the child must do is fill in the details specific to his society’s particular vocabulary and syntax, and he or she is done.

The Empiricist, seeing this claim as patently ridiculous, then goes too far in the other direction. He or she claims that the child may simply statistically observe what words follow what other words, correlate these occurrences with facts about the external world, and over time he or she will speak fluently. These processes are decently model-able, and perform with some small level of competency, and mistakes are excused by the casual admission ‘of course the human mind is far more complicated and intricate than this simple system’.

I would posit, then, that if we soften the definition of “innate”, then a biologically and cognitively reasonable solution emerges quite easily. Firstly, the parts of speech emerge quite naturally from the world around us.[1] The world around us is full of objects (nouns) which persist over time and space (prepositions), and have qualities which differentiate them from one another (adjectives). Some of these objects can perform actions (verbs) in a particular manner (adverbs). More abstract forms are required by societal pressures which demand future actions, judge on past actions, and encourage modes of thought.

The recursive nature of language, one of Chomsky’s most notable features, is also in and of itself not terribly surprising. On a cognitive level, the phrase-structure-tree nature of language simply speaks to mankind’s incredible capacity for modes of ontological/categorizational thought. We take an object or action, tack on descriptors, and then tack on descriptors of the descriptors, building “syntactic trees” all the way up. The consistency of grammaticality in utterances (which, is nowhere near as consistent as any Nativist position would require, but more consistent than any known Empiricist model can account for) is simply a result of the demands placed on us by the social nature of language—we must utter, to the extent we can, sentences which others can interpret. In the end, what Nativists call “Universal Grammar” is just a set of principles which are the most efficient mapping of our already-present cognitive skills to interpersonal communication of those ideas.

In this way, I believe that the Nativism vs. Empiricism debate comes down to what each group classifies as “innate”. Certainly, we have nearly identical genetic make-ups, and these genes lead us to have similar brains, capable of perception, sound production, concept abstraction, classification. On top of this, we have evolved enough to remove genes from the gene pool which could not produce language. In this way, language is “innate”. However, this does not make Chomsky’s proposed species-specific, task-specific language organ evident, nor does it give any special “pre-written” nature to Universal Grammar. Language is simply an extremely pragmatic and heavily evolved system which fits mankind’s needs very well.

[1] Whether or not these features are inherent in any possible observation of the world is secondary—we are discussing human language, and so we must only consider ways in which humans perceive the world.

“The Ubiquitous Matrix of Lies” by Charles Eisenstein

2009-08-01T21:32:00.001-07:00

A sort of follow-up to my re-blog of Alan Kirby’s “The Death of Postmodernism And Beyond”. This time, it’s an updated spin on Orwell’s famous piece on “Newspeak”. http://www.realitysandwich.com/ubiquitous_matrix_lies

I don’t know if this was intended by the author, but it’s important to note the significant departure from Orwell’s original Whorfian thesis—instead of presuming that by manipulating words and “doubletalking” to us we’ll be literally unable to think certain thoughts, Eisenstein instead investigates the psychological and cultural implications of entire generations growing up knowing that the vast vast majority of what they see is corporate manipulation of fact and opinion: “posturing”.

Within the coming weeks, I’ll be writing up a preliminary thoughtsketch of what my thoughts are on this cultural/critical "movement”/trend

-----------

Let's begin with beer. Near my home I drive past a billboard advertisement for Coors Light. The slogan is, "Coors rocks Harrisburg." Now, does anybody actually believe that Coors does in fact "rock Harrisburg?" No. Does the Coors corporation itself believe it? No. Does anyone believe that Coors believes it? No. It is a lie, everyone knows it is a lie, and no one cares. Everyone automatically writes it off as an ad slogan, an image campaign.

The next sign advertises Miller Beer with the phrase, "Fresh beer tastes better." Does anyone actually think Miller is fresher than Budweiser, Coors, or Pabst? No. Does anyone at Miller Brewing think that? No. It is another obvious and unremarkable lie, beneath the threshold of most people's awareness. But it contributes to a feeling of living in a phony world where words don't matter and nothing is real.

Here is another beer slogan, for Carlsburg: "Probably the best beer in the world." Obviously, the word "probably" has been chosen to suggest that someone devoted great consideration to this question, sampled all the world's great beers, and finally issued an impartial judgment. Of course, nothing of the sort happened. No one thinks it did. Everyone knows that actually what happened is a bunch of advertising pros thought up a slogan in an effort to create an "image." Isn't it remarkable that lies are still effective even when no one believes them? Unfortunately, when it hardly matters whether words are truth or lies, then words lose their power to convey the truth.

Continuing on my way, I drive past the Colonial Park Mall, a generic, boxy edifice amidst a vast expanse of concrete. There is no park here, nor is there actually any connection with anything "colonial," a word chosen to evoke an image of simple times, kind folk, and quality craftsmanship. The mall is home to a food court called "Café in the Park," a name chosen to evoke (who knows?) a Parisian café with outdoor tables under the shade of the trees. Basically, the entire name is a lie. No café, no park, nothing colonial. And this lie is, again, completely unremarkable.

Increasingly, words don't mean anything. In politics, campaigning candidates make statements that flatly contradict their actions and policies, and no one seems to object or even care. It is not the routine dissembling of political figures that is striking, but rather our near-complete indifference to it. We are as well almost completely inured to the vacuity of advertising copy, the words of which increasingly mean nothing at all to the reader. Does anyone really believe that GE "brings good things to life?" Or that a housing development I passed today - "Walnut Crossing" - actually has any walnut trees or crossings? From brand names to PR slogans to political code-words, the language of the media that inundates modern life consists almost wholly of subtle lies, misdirection, and manipulation.

We live in a ubiquitous matrix of lies, a sea of mendacity so pervasive that it is nearly invisible. Because we are lied to all the time, in ways so subtle they are beneath conscious notice, even the most direct lies are losing their power to shock us.

The most shocking thing about the lies of the Bush administration was that those lies were not actually shocking to most people. Why do we as a society seemingly accept our leaders' gross dishonesty as a matter of course? Why does the repeated exposure of their lies seem to arouse barely a ripple of indignation among the general public? Where is the protest, the outrage, the sense of betrayal?

It is certainly not to be found in the person of Barack Obama. Just as there is little difference between Coors and Miller, so also is there little difference in the policies of Bush and Obama. I realize that this statement will provoke outrage from many of my readers. Sure, there are some differences between them - enough to establish Obama as a new brand - but the basic course of empire, of finance, the military, medicine, law, education, of all the defining institutions of our society remains unchanged.

Significantly, during the campaign most of the media commentary on his speeches was about the image they created, their emotional effect, and not their content. Today, the content barely matters except for what image it creates. Words become merely emotive signs, not semantic ones. Therefore, even though I don't think Obama tells deliberate lies as did his predecessors, the change in the way we use and receive language makes it impossible for him to tell the truth either. Everything is heard through a filter of meta-interpretations; we hear not words but code-words, not semantic meaning but signals and "messages." Words don't mean what they mean. Speaking into such a listening, it becomes impossible to really tell the truth. Even if a politician speaks plainly, we hear an attempt to create an image of plainspokenness.

Thus it is that people detect a certain indefinable insincerity underneath Obama's words - insincerity is now built in to the language of politics. (It is also inherent in the contradictions of our civilization's deep ideology, but that is a different matter.) Playing by the rules of the political game, as Obama most definitely does, he can do naught but lie. His "hope" and "change" will be exposed as the brands they are. People will see that there is little cause to hope, and that not much has changed. The despair, cynicism, and sense of betrayal that will result will foment a dangerous crisis and, in the end, a profound renewal of public discourse that demands truth and has no patience with inauthenticity.

Above I asked, "Where is the indignation, the outrage, at the lies in which we are immersed?" Clearly, the answer lies deeper than the machinations of one or another faction of the power elite. It lies deeper than the subversion and control of the media. Part of our society's apathy arises from a subtle and profound disempowerment: the de-potentiation of language itself, along with all other forms of symbolic culture. Words are losing their power to create and to transform. The result is a tyranny that can never be overthrown, but will only proceed toward totality until it collapses under the weight of the multiple crises it inevitably generates.

As we acclimate ourselves to a ubiquitous matrix of lies, words mean less and less to us, and we don't believe anything any more. As well we shouldn't! We are facing a crisis of language that underlies and mirrors all the other converging crises of the modern age. Just as a growing profusion of material and social technology has failed to bring about the promised Utopia of leisure, health, and justice, so has the profusion of words and media failed to bring about better communication. Instead, the opposite has happened.

We are faced with a paradox. On the one hand, in a technological society, words are themselves actions. The entire modern world is built on language, on symbol. Any endeavor requiring the coordination of human activity beyond a very small scale requires language. You cannot build a microchip, run an airport or a government, wage a war, organize a peace movement, or build a wind turbine without a vast apparatus of codified instruction books, technical manuals, educational curricula, time schedules, planning documents, memos, instructions, measurements, and data. If the President decides to bomb Iran, do you know how he will do it? With words. He literally has the power to speak a war into being. Like the Old Testament Jehovah, we create the world with our words. Neither the President nor Congress really ever does anything but talk (and write). Unless you work with your hands as a carpenter or garbage collector, you are probably the same.
What are we to do, then, when words, our primary creative tool in the modern world, have become impotent? Surely political activists must ask this of themselves, as they shout the truth from the rooftops, loud and clear, to so little effect (yes there are some small victories, but the inferno rages on). We feel the urge to stop talking and get out there and DO something. But to do is to speak. An exception might be the activists who, impatient with all the talk, go out there and sabotage tractors and spike trees. Ironically, the main impact of such operations usually comes from their symbolic power, which has quickly diminished (in the public consciousness) to the status of gimmicks and stunts.

Something similar might be said of mass protests, which began to lose their power after the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s. Originally, marches and demonstrations were intended not only to attract media attention, but carried the threat of actual physical action. Their essence was, "We're sick of sitting around talking, we're going to do something about this!" But as protests turned into media events, whose success was defined by the amount and kind of coverage, they became just another form of talking: they "raise awareness" and "send a message." Not since Seattle in 1998 has the physicality of street action had much of an effect. (In other parts of the world it is a different story. In China, for instance, protestors in rural villages are wont to [literally] tar and feather corrupt local officials. In Europe, mass demonstrations paralyze commerce and government.) It is not that the symbolic aspect of such actions is unimportant, but when they become wholly symbolic, the symbol loses its connection to - and impact on - reality.

It is not only that the powers that be so completely dominate the narratives of our time that any dissent seems irrational or illegitimate. The words of the dominant powers are losing their potency as well! The primary method by which governments increase their control is by creating fear. In this atmosphere, it is easy to declare new wars, impose new restrictions on freedom, make people accept new sacrifices, etc. With this in mind, I was gratified to see the utter failure of the "terrorism threat level" color-coding system to instill panic. You may have heard the message in airports: "the Department of Homeland Security has raised the terror alert threat level to orange..." Does anyone say, "Oh my God, it is orange! That's just one step short of a red alert!"? No. The words impact us as the buzzing of a fly. Another example is the recent failure of government scaremongering about the swine flu, a fine opportunity to implement mandatory vaccination programs, build mass quarantine facilities, etc.

Perhaps the most significant failure of the language of the rulers is the futility of their rosy economic pronouncements to reverse the progressive unwinding of the global financial system. (For money, too, is a story, a system of meanings and symbols that assigns roles, focuses collective intentions, and coordinates human activity.) When governments fail, such as in the breakup of the Soviet Union, a terminal symptom is the failure of the credibility of their leaders' words. When reality conflicts more and more obviously with the pronouncements of leaders, then when they say, "This shall be," no one believes that either. Laws, authority, currencies, and so on are all systems of symbols. When they break down, what remains is as Chairman Mao described: "Power comes from the barrel of a gun." That is why I think the finale of the de-potentiation of public speech will be an interlude of rule by naked force.
I note as an aside that it is not only public language that is losing its power and suffering a crisis of meaning. The same is happening to all symbolic communication. To quote from The Ascent of Humanity, "Another symptom of the breakdown of semantic meaning is the routine use of words like 'awesome,' 'amazing,' and 'incredible' to describe what is actually trivial, boring, and mundane. We are running out of words, or words are running out of meaning, forcing us into increasingly exaggerated elocutions to communicate at all."

We might say that the crisis of our civilization comes down to a crisis of language, in which words have seemingly lost their ability to create. We have all the technology and all the knowledge we need to live in beautiful harmony with each other and the planet. What we need is different collective choices. Choices arise from perceptions, perceptions arise from interpretations or stories, and stories are built of words, of symbols. Today, words have lost their power and our society's stories have seemingly taken on a life of their own, propelling us toward an end that no sane person would choose and that we seem helpless to resist. And helpless we are, when all we have are impotent words.

It is as if, as in The Emperor's New Clothes, the boy has cried, "The emperor is completely naked" and everyone hears him but no one cares. The parade marches on, an increasingly contrived and ruinous spectacle that no one, not even its leaders, truly believes in.

What, then, are we as writers, as speakers, as humans, to do? Shall we stop writing? No. But let us not labor under any illusions. The truth has been exposed again and again, but to what effect? What have forty years of correct analysis of the environmental and political state of the world brought us? The reason that the entire staff of Counterpunch, The Nation, and Truthout is not in a concentration camp is that it is not necessary. Words themselves have been robbed of their power. Thoreau said, "It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak and another to hear." Who hears now but the already-converted?
A picture is worth a thousand words - perhaps the image can rescue us from the crisis of language. Unfortunately, it cannot. The same air of unreality has come to infect the realm of images as has debilitated the power of words. In an age of virtual reality, immersive video games, on-line interactive worlds like Second Life, computer 3D animation, and routine graphic depictions of violence on screen, images of real atrocities are losing their power to shock. For the viewer, there is little observable difference between images of real violence and its on-screen simulation - both are just a set of pixels and neither impacts the viewer's off-screen reality in any tangible way. It's all happening in TV-land. Perhaps this explains the absence of any national sense of shame or soul-searching in the wake of Abu Ghraib. For many, it was just another bunch of images, just as 600,000 Iraqis dead is another string of digits.

Like words, images have become divorced from the objects they are supposed to represent, until the very word "image" itself has taken on connotations of inauthenticity: a corporate image, a politician's image. In a world of lies and images, nothing is real. Immersed in such a world, is the political apathy of the American public so difficult to understand?

The danger when we operate wholly in a world of representations and images is that we begin to mistake that world for reality, and to believe that by manipulating symbols we can automatically change the reality they represent. We lose touch with the reality behind the symbols. Grisly death becomes collateral damage. Torture becomes enhanced interrogation. A bill to gut pollution controls becomes the Clear Skies Act. Defeat in Iraq becomes victory. War becomes peace. Hate becomes love. Slavery becomes freedom.

The Orwellian ambition to render language incapable of even expressing the concept "freedom" has nearly been fulfilled. Not by eliminating the word, but by converting it into a mere image, an empty shell, a brand. How can the voices of protest be effective when everyone discounts all speech as image, spin, and hype? Whatever you say, it is in the end just words.
Take heart: the evisceration of the language that makes our tyranny impregnable also ensures its eventual demise. The words, numbers, and images over which it exercises complete control are less and less congruent to reality. Such is the folly of the infamous "Brand America" campaign, designed to burnish America's "image" abroad. The image has become more important than the reality. Bombs blow up innocent civilians to send a "message" to the "terrorists." No matter that this message exists only in the fantasies of our leaders. They are, like those they rule, immersed in an increasingly impotent world of symbol and cannot understand why the world does not conform to their manipulation of its representation, the pieces on their global chessboard.

However we play with the statistics to cover up the converging crises of our time, the crises continue to intensify. We can euphemize the autism crisis away, the obesity epidemic, the soil crisis, the water crisis, the energy crisis. We can dumb down standardized exams to cover up the accelerating implosion of the educational system. We can redefine people in and out of poverty and manipulate economic statistics. We can declare - simply declare - that the forests are not in precipitous decline. For a while we can hide the gathering collapse of environment and polity, economy and ecology, but eventually reality will break through.

As we rebuild from the wreckage that follows, let us remember the lesson we have learned. The power of the word, like all magical powers, will turn against us or wither and die if not renewed by frequent reconnection to its source.

Abstracted too many levels from its source, language maroons us in a factitious fantasy world, an unconscious story that turns us into its victims. Those of us dedicated to creating a more beautiful world must not lose ourselves in abstraction. Let us not imagine that we are more intelligent than the Neo-cons in their think tanks or the liberal professors in their universities. They are just as clever as anyone else at manipulating logic. All they say follows logically from their premises. It is the premises that are at fault, and these cannot be reasoned out. Remember that the Neo-cons too believe they are creating a better world. Only arrogance would say that we, being smarter than they are, can do better. Indeed, it is arrogance that defines them, and the opposite of arrogance is humility, and to be humble is to constantly open to new truth from the outside, from the real world and not one's interpretation of it.

That is the only thing that can keep us honest. Horror results when we get lost in a world of axioms and ideals. Many before us on left and right have reasoned atrocity out to a nicety. We stay honest by grounding ourselves again and again in the reality outside representation. When environmentalists focus on cost-benefit analyses and study data rather than real, physical places, trees, ponds, and animals, they end up making all the sickening compromises of the Beltway. Liberal economists with the best of intentions cheer when a poor country raises its GDP; invisible to their statistics is the unraveling of culture and community that fuels the money economy. Visit a real "mountaintop removal" operation and you know that there is no compromise that is not betrayal. Visit a real third-world community and the vacuity of free-trade logic is obvious. See the devastation of a bullet wound or a bomb strike, lives strewn across the street, and the logic of national interest seems monstrous.

Increasingly isolated in a virtual world, the people fear authenticity even as they crave it. Except in the young, the fear usually prevails over the craving until something happens to make life fall apart. Following the pattern experienced by Cindy Sheehan, the fundamental corruption of first one, then all of our civilization's major institutions becomes transparent. I have seen this many times in various areas of activism. Someone discovers that the pharmaceutical industry, or the music industry, or the oil industry, or organized religion, or Big Science, or the food industry is shockingly corrupt, but still believes in the basic soundness of the system as a whole. Eventually, in a natural process of radicalization, they discover that the rot is endemic to all of these and more. Each institution supports, affirms, and draws its own legitimacy from the others. So we discover eventually that the wrongness permeates every institution, and we desire to find and uproot its source.

As activists for the truth, we are midwives to this process. It is not quite true that no one heeds the boy's cry that the emperor is naked. Those who are ready to hear will hear, and they are made ready when their world crumbles. The exposing of all that is wrong serves an important purpose in guiding people from the old world to the threshold of a new - but only to the threshold, not across it. To enter into the new world requires that we recover the tools of world-creation: first and foremost, the power of word.

A nicer term for a "ubiquitous matrix of lies" would be a "ubiquitous matrix of stories." I am not suggesting that we abdicate the creative power of language. Language is an essential means to coordinate human activity, for beauty as well as for destruction. The stories we tell with words unite masses of people toward a common goal, and assign the meanings and roles necessary to attain it. To be sure, images, music, and art, both representational and non-representational, contribute to the weaving of a story, especially evoking the emotional energy that powers it, but information is indispensable as well. In a new world we will not cease to tell the story of what is and what shall be, but we will become conscious of our storytelling. The sequel to this essay will explore what I call "storyteller consciousness" on a cultural and personal level, so that we may prepare to tell the story of a more beautiful world, and to speak that world into existence as presidents and kings have spoken wars into existence for thousands of years. As these old stories fall apart, the time ripens for new ones. And the old stories are indeed falling apart, of which our increasing immunity to political and commercial speech is a symptom. No more or less significant a symptom is the crumbling of our great social institutions - education, politics, medicine, money - that are themselves built of a matrix of stories. When stories fall apart, the world falls apart.

As the crises of our age converge and infiltrate the fortresses we have erected to preserve the virtual world of euphemism and pretense, the world is falling apart for more and more people at once. The stories that have defined us and bound us are dying. We sense, as counterpart to the existential anxiety that comes as the old world and our identity within it disintegrates, an invigorating newness close at hand. So let us cease to be afraid as we stand at the threshold. It is time to learn the technologies, linguistic and otherwise, of world-creation.

Rote-list Error/Requirements of Language in the Consciousness Debate

2009-07-29T19:44:00.001-07:00

This is, in essence, an update to my arguments against John Searle’s “Chinese Room” argument. The prior one attacked a concept of strong consciousness being the impeding factor, this one looks at a more simple distinction.

Most versions of the Chinese Room argument which one finds on the web posit a “huge book which contains an appropriate response for any input”. Clearly, the Chinese Room cannot just contain a book that lists every response to every input—there is an infinite number of producible sentences. As such, the book/“instruction manual” must contain a program.

Once we concede that the system contains a program, we must think of what such a program would entail. As I’m sure any language-user would agree, the way we manage to produce utterances is through a series of complex syntactic processes which give new cause/effect/reasoning/descriptive/etc. data to the words contained in the utterance. In other words, we form new associations between concepts. As such, any program which competently forms dialogical sentences (or even monological sentences) would need to embed within the algorithm immensely complex webs of association, memory, knowledge, rationality, and all other such implementations of stored, functional experience. Once these things are within the program, is it so easy to imagine that the room does, indeed, not understand Chinese?

Vernacular Music: The Meaning of the Mash-Up (Abstract)

2009-07-28T17:37:00.001-07:00

“Not until you listen to RKM on a rocky / mountaintop have you heard hip-hop. / Extract the urban element that created it / and let an open wide countryside illustrate it.”

—Saul Williams, “NGH WHT”

Definition: “a fusion of disparate musical elements [...] a piece of popular music created by merging the elements of two or more existing songs using computer technology and production techniques” (OED)

Musical Criticism
1. Market pressures of capitalism shape all art into becoming products. Those products which can be sold to the most buyers flood the marketplace.
2. Original, “classical” music was crafted with its own set of symbols and rules. This syntax and semantics of classical music was unknown to most listeners. As such, they could only value that which they could understand—lyrics (if present), melody, and climax.
3. Combining points 1 and 2, music evolved into what we know today as “pop”—where simple lyrics, catchy melody, and memorable climax are all that matter.
Neuroscience
1. To go a little deeper into how this happened, we will briefly go over the neuroscience of musical experience
2. Music communicates subjective states. It elicits these emotional responses through the generation of expectations, and the subsequent violation or satisfaction of these expectations.
3. In classical music, this works by developing harmony and themes through a strict set of rules and traditions—all unknown to the layperson.
4. In pop music, this is done on a much simpler, digestible level.
5. Where pop music excels, however, is in its neural stimulation of different emotional responses, namely: memory
Linguistics

To frame this in a different manner, classical music created syntax which were not interpretable by average listeners
Unable to understand the language, listeners began to interpret the signs in a semantics-heavy manner
Each melody, each climax, held its own set of associations, and consequently, emotional meanings

Response

The mash-up, then, takes this misappropriation of musical meaning to its next logical step
Rather than fashioning music in the “arcane” syntax of music theory, music can be formulated as a series (and parallel) of musical allusions
The atomic of element would no longer be the “note”, but rather the “quote”
In this way, mash-ups alter their source meanings by altering repetitions (short-term memory) and context (long-term memory)
Mash-ups began as explicitly ironic, but have slowly become their own post-ironic genre
They are our generation’s vernacular music—our way of communicating in a language we understand—democratic and free.

Different views on the “Singularity”

2009-07-27T21:26:00.001-07:00

My feelings on the subject of “Singularity” remain mixed. On one hand, I share Ray Kurzweil’s enthusiasm for new technologies relating to cognition and artificial intelligence. I believe that human-level AI will be one of the most significant advances mankind makes in its history, outshining most all other inventions in our history in terms of scope and impact. I also believe that, on the whole, such inventions will be amazingly beneficial to humankind. On the other, history is full of example after example of inventions gone awry, misunderstood and misused for generations. When a technology like AI is birthed upon the world, any minor flaw would have extremely large consequences. This is the case with most all technologies—in a competitive environment, those who take the advantages the technology provides in the short term prosper over those who do not. This increased prosperity leads to an evolutionary advantage (either genetically or culturally), driving out the late adopters. However, by evolutionarily rewarding short term investments, cultures become wholly dependent on flawed systems. These flaws are often extremely minor, and as such only begin to reveal their effects years and years down the line, but by then the damage has been done.

In this respect, I echo Robert Wright’s theory of handbrake development—until very recent history, separate cultures were free to develop separate technologies (both physical and sociopolitical). Those cultures that were reliant upon faulty technologies would die out, but those that developed good technologies spread them. However, we are at a stage in human cultural evolution now that our decisions have global impact—those which once would cause our culture alone to die out will now kill off our entire species. Global warming, weapons of mass destruction, and the other issues which now face us daily speak to this issue of internationalization of danger, and but one slip up can cause the entire system to collapse irrevocably.

For these reasons, I take what I would term a “reserved approach” to artificial intelligence. By this I mean that I am fully in support of the development of AI technologies, but am extremely concerned about “getting it right” the first time. While dystopian flicks such as the Terminator and Matrix series certainly exaggerate the dangers, there is certainly a large effort that must be put into developing “nice” AIs to avoid even slightly similar outcomes. The first software-intensive AI will likely be easily distributable (and piratable!) via the web, so it will spread very quickly to a large system, exponentially increasing its impact. Any malicious code introduced to the system at this “seed stage” will affect all future iterations of its development, acting as the proverbial butterfly before the hurricane. For these reasons, we must be sure to proceed with extreme caution, developing the technologies slowly but surely, testing extensively along the way, and doing all the necessary base level work before such a huge step is taken in our technological history.

Against Searle’s “Chinese Room” argument

2009-07-19T13:30:00.001-07:00

I write this in response to John Searle’s essay “Minds, Brains, and Programs”. Specifically, I wish to counter his thesis—that computers could never have consciousness—by challenging his base-level assumption—that humans have “understanding”. Now, philosophers have been arguing since Greece over what constitutes “mind” and what constitutes “body”. However, with the significant recent advances in computer science, cognitive science, and neuroscience, it is not unsafe to say that we stand now at a vastly different intellectual moment than our philosophical forefathers. In this light, I feel it is fairly safe to say that humans do not have what classical dualists would have called “consciousness”. There is no external, ethereal “mind” which sits separate from the body, no homunculus behind our thoughts. Everything we do must, in the end, condense down to neurons firing neurons firing neurons.

For the skeptical, I suppose it would help to explain a small amount of what this theory of consciousness would entail. Although I am not quite certain of its details, I hypothesize that our sensation of consciousness would amount to self-monitored brain states. For example, our “stream of consciousness” could be attention paid selectively to our inner language processing system. In addition to these simple first-order selective-attentional processes, the “consciousness organ” likely has a property of recursion—an ability to pay attention to itself paying attention to itself, which amounts to the classical definition of consciousness being “aware that one is self-aware”.

In these ways, robots, and computers more generally, could very feasibly be “conscious”. Likely we would not be able to program or build them to be conscious in the exact same ways we are, but so long as we trust that consciousness and Searle’s “understanding” are material properties of certain systems, then the argument disappears completely.

Psychopath: The Use of Rhetorical Imbalance in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket

2009-07-15T03:35:00.001-07:00

psy·cho·pa·thy

1. a mental disorder in which an individual manifests amoral and antisocial behavior, lack of ability to love or establish meaningful personal relationships, extreme egocentricity, failure to learn from experience, etc.

One of the fundamental issues of humanity is how we justify the use of violence and hostility for furthering personal or societal goals. We seem to be imbued from birth with the sense that any use of violence for personal gain, such as robbery and mugging, is inherently evil and unacceptable. However, as the perpetrator and victim grow in scale from personal to communal, the issue becomes more and more clouded. While street fights are looked down upon, we seem all too willing to engage in full-scale spectacles of carnage known as war. At what point in the expansion, then, does killing become justified, and what methods are acceptable? What about the methods with which we convince others to engage in aggression? Stanley Kubrick tackles both of these questions in his film Full Metal Jacket. In the film, he presents the stories of various men in the United States military before and during their involvement in the Vietnam War. Over the course of the film, we observe the ways in which each of them react to the prospect of being forced to remove all traces of super-ego from their system and succumb to a world where they make a living by killing other people. The military machine achieves this goal by subjecting its recruits to a psychologically and physically rigorous training camp so radically different from normal life that it nearly destroys all shreds of humanity present in the soldiers. Kubrick accentuates this message through a palpable imbalance between ethos, pathos, and logos to emphasize the dehumanizing elements of the military lifestyle. In the film, militaristic logos is over-exaggerated in such an ironic manner that the argument against military structure and indoctrination becomes a pathetic appeal.

Full Metal Jacket is notably divided into two distinct sections, each analyzing a different aspect of the military lifestyle and how it dehumanizes all participants. The first half looks at how boot camp and military training go about removing all human emotions from the trainees through the story of a private nicknamed “Gomer Pyle” (after the character on The Andy Griffith Show who was a dim-witted, well-intentioned farm boy who eventually enlisted in the marines). Pyle begins the film as the stereotypical “fat kid” who can’t seem to do anything right, but as the drill sergeant becomes more and more frustrated with his incompetence and increases his punishments, things begin to go horribly wrong for all involved. The key catalytic moment occurs when the sergeant decides that the best way to motivate “Private Pyle” is to punish the other soldiers instead of Pyle himself. This angers the other soldiers to the point where they beat him with bars of soap wrapped in towels in the middle of the night, even convincing the innocent Private “Joker,” who has been assigned as Pyle’s mentor, to join in. This turns Pyle psychopathic: he begins talking to his rifle, and becomes completely focused on military discipline to the point of secluding himself from his fellow platoon members. On the last day of training, he loads his rifle “Charlene” full of live rounds and shoots the Sergeant in the chest, and then commits suicide.

Pyle’s (and, consequently, Kubrick’s) focus on the logic-based mindset of the armed forces is what first warns the audience of the dangers of militarism. Upon first viewing it would seem that the overwhelming use of white, sterile environments and repetitive scenes of marching and chanting in unison would hint at an emotionless logos-driven rhetoric (As the Sergeant says, “You will not laugh, you will not cry, you will learn by the numbers”). The lives of the marines are detailed in quotidian monotony; they are simply numbers to an emotionless construct, focused all too highly on the ultimate goal at the expense of its own health and well-being. This instability and heartless discipline is the source of Kubrick’s discontent, the distaste with the military machine which pervades the movie and is the ultimate end of his argument. This argument is made most drastically through the first half of the film, through the tragic tale of Private Pyle.

What makes Pyle’s story so haunting and disturbing is not necessarily the plot itself, although the plot is certainly disconcerting, but rather the stark imbalance of the three rhetorical devices: ethos, pathos, and logos. The film almost completely abandons any use of ethos (other than the portrayal of Joker as a mostly kind and moral character), and only uses logos in a decidedly ironic manner, to the point where scenes of logos become inherently pathos-based. Kubrick has, through Pyle’s (and later Joker’s) story, planted in the audience’s mind the concept that the logos of war is something to be lamented and avoided at all cost, appealing to the emotions of the audience. However, these scenes are not only used with heavy-handed irony, exaggerated to the point where it makes the viewer uncomfortable to see such monotony and mindlessness, but also to provide stark contrast against the melodramatic moments such as the night beating scene and Pyle’s final meltdown. By first lulling the audience into an emotionless, logos-driven void, and then throwing in disturbing scenes of complete pathos, the dramatic scenes become all the more vivid. Kubrick uses this amazingly effective technique to drive home his strongest arguments once he has the audience in the palm of his hands: that war is an inherently cruel and dehumanizing machine, through which all participants are fundamentally corrupted into committing unjustifiable actions.

Once the narrative progresses to the second half of the movie, located in Vietnam, the tone of the movie changes slightly but maintains Kubrick’s signature use of long stretches of content without much emotion alternating against scenes of intense melodrama. Although the progression of the second half of the movie is not as cataclysmic and therefore not as heavy-handed as the first half, it is essentially the same story. The main character of this portion is Joker, who was Pyle’s mentor and is now a military reporter who, following the Tet Offensive, has been moved to front-line combat alongside his friend Cowboy. While Pyle of the first half of the film starts completely incapable and ends up going off the deep end into complete psychopathy, Joker starts as a more human and identifiable character, which makes his subtle transformation into a killer more subconsciously disconcerting.

The role of the cold drill sergeant from the first half of the film is now replaced by two characters. The first is a gunner on the helicopter that takes Private Joker to the action, shooting indiscriminately into a field full of North Vietnamese civilians, saying that any who run will die, and any who are still are “well trained.” This door gunner is the most purely psychopathic character in the whole movie; he shows a comically (and therefore shockingly) complete absence of any sort of empathy for any other person involved in the war effort. Again, Kubrick again shows that his absence of pathos is something to be pitied by cutting to multiple shots of our lead character, Joker, in complete disgust. The second is a more prominent character nicknamed “Animal Mother.” Animal Mother is the quintessential heartless soldier, who believes that the only worthwhile aspect of war is victory, which must come at any price. Indeed, his helmet reads “I AM BECOME DEATH,” a quote from Oppenheimer when reflecting on his contribution to the atomic bomb project. Animal Mother has “become death” in that he has sacrificed his identity, his real name, and consequently his humanity to the military. He is precisely what the United States army wants out of its soldiers, as Joker says in the first half of the film: “The Marine Corps wants killers. The Marine Corps wants to build indestructible men, men without fear.” Whenever Joker is around Animal Mother, he seems both amazed and disgusted: he is amazed at Animal Mother’s ruthless efficiency and military skill, yet disgusted by his sheer lack of compassion or empathy for his enemy, a sure sign of the psychopathy in which war encourages its participants to engage. Yet again, Kubrick is presenting a character so full of military logos that we, like Joker, are to be swayed through pathos to his apparent plight, his lack of a soul.

This contrast between military logic and its dire emotional consequences are present even in the plot points of the time Joker spends in Vietnam. We are constantly exposed to scenes where all participants act in a logical and precise manner, following orders and procedure to the letter, and yet arrive at unacceptable conclusions. Logically, based upon past evidence, there was no reason to believe that there would be an enemy offensive on the Tet holiday. Joker’s unit progresses by the book into their first city, which results in the death of their commander. Once Cowboy takes command, the metaphor is made more evident when they march to the incorrect location, an unacceptable conclusion, where members of the unit are “wasted” by an enemy sniper. Only here does the unit begin to disobey command, to both positive and negative results. While going by the book would require them to retreat from the non-essential map point despite the death of a soldier, the members of the unit are too filled with pathos to let the logos and ethos of military order dissuade them from leaving their friend behind. While at first this decision is catastrophic for the team, costing them yet another member and their commander (Joker’s friend Cowboy), the situation is resolved once the unit finds the sniper and Joker mercy-kills her. As we watch Joker wrestle with the decision of whether or not to kill her, we as an audience are asked the core questions of the film in tandem: is Joker’s decision to kill this woman justified? How did he come to the point where he is able to make such a decision?

Kubrick seems to imply in the scene that the shot is justifiable, and indeed it seems the only truly moral death of the entire film. Each kind of killing is presented throughout the film: militaristic, vengeful, psychopathic, merciful, and suicidal. Military kills are those which the soldiers have been ordered to do, kills for the furthering of political goals. Vengeful kills are murders done in repayment for personal wrongs, like when Pyle kills the Sergeant. Psychopathic kills are those which are done for no true over-arching reason, random kills like those of the helicopter gunner. Merciful kills are those rare instances in which the victim would be worse off alive than dead, and often wishes for death at the hands of the perpetrator. Suicide is obviously any self-inflicted murder. Each of these motivations and styles of killing is presented and then torn down as immoral throughout the film, except for that of the merciful kill. The immorality of the militaristic murders are emphasized through the audience’s knowledge of the ultimate fruitlessness of the Vietnam war, reminding us that all these lives taken in a war which was highly lambasted by the public and generally seen as one of the largest US foreign policy blunders of its history. The vengeful homicide of the sergeant is obviously immoral to the audience. This is specifically displayed by Pyle’s immediate regrets, contributing to his suicide (another kill which seems to have no virtuous achievement), along with the astonishment shown by Joker. The psychopathic helicopter gunner is immediately shown immoral by Joker’s incredulous questioning of his shooting of the women and children. The mercy killing, however, is committed by the only (near-)consistently virtuous character and is done at the request of the victim. Even this moral homicide, however, is considered at length by the protagonist. With this scene, Kubrick is telling us through the ethos established by Joker’s virtuous nature and the pathos of the pleading woman that even the only execution which could be justified in the film is still just barely acceptable. Even perceptibly moral killings are to be approached with hesitation and extreme consideration.

Through this ending sequence especially, Kubrick is showing how even when the soldiers make the humane decision, rejecting the military machine in favor of human bonds, they suffer greatly. The system of war is so entrenchedly evil and inhumane that no heroic decision can salvage them. Although Kubrick would argue that essentially all vengeance kills are not acceptable, he has set up one that is acceptable as one could be, and on top of that the kill a mercy kill, but even still the execution is fundamentally corrupting of the previously clean soul of Joker, the only character who has built up any ethos in the film. As soon as humanity enters into the act of war, all participants both direct and indirect are harmed as a result.

As is evident, Kubrick completely rejects the essential assumption of war: that through acts of evil, greater good can be achieved. When his characters follow the precepts of war, they are killed, and when they disobey, they still suffer. As his characters are trained for war, they are stripped of all things which would make them human, all elements of a soul or a super-ego, turned psychopathic by a system which requires them to kill for the greater good. Whether they end up going ballistic or are simply tarnished by finally having to pull the trigger on an enemy, all are dehumanized by an institution which treats them more as numbers than as people, as elements of logos rather than pathos.

"The Death of Postmodernism And Beyond" by Alan Kirby

2009-07-06T23:42:00.000-07:00

I have nothing to add to this absolutely brilliant piece on modern modes of thought and culture:
(link: http://www.philosophynow.org/issue58/58kirby.htm )

-----------

Alan Kirby says postmodernism is dead and buried. In its place comes a new paradigm of authority and knowledge formed under the pressure of new technologies and contemporary social forces.

I have in front of me a module description downloaded from a British university English department’s website. It includes details of assignments and a week-by-week reading list for the optional module ‘Postmodern Fictions’, and if the university is to remain nameless here it’s not because the module is in any way shameful but that it handily represents modules or module parts which will be taught in virtually every English department in the land this coming academic year. It assumes that postmodernism is alive, thriving and kicking: it says it will introduce “the general topics of ‘postmodernism’ and ‘postmodernity’ by examining their relationship to the contemporary writing of fiction”. This might suggest that postmodernism is contemporary, but the comparison actually shows that it is dead and buried.

Postmodern philosophy emphasises the elusiveness of meaning and knowledge. This is often expressed in postmodern art as a concern with representation and an ironic self-awareness. And the argument that postmodernism is over has already been made philosophically. There are people who have essentially asserted that for a while we believed in postmodern ideas, but not any more, and from now on we’re going to believe in critical realism. The weakness in this analysis is that it centres on the academy, on the practices and suppositions of philosophers who may or may not be shifting ground or about to shift – and many academics will simply decide that, finally, they prefer to stay with Foucault [arch postmodernist] than go over to anything else. However, a far more compelling case can be made that postmodernism is dead by looking outside the academy at current cultural production.

Most of the undergraduates who will take ‘Postmodern Fictions’ this year will have been born in 1985 or after, and all but one of the module’s primary texts were written before their lifetime. Far from being ‘contemporary’, these texts were published in another world, before the students were born: The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Nights at the Circus, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (and Blade Runner), White Noise: this is Mum and Dad’s culture. Some of the texts (‘The Library of Babel’) were written even before their parents were born. Replace this cache with other postmodern stalwarts – Beloved, Flaubert’s Parrot, Waterland, The Crying of Lot 49, Pale Fire, Slaughterhouse 5, Lanark, Neuromancer, anything by B.S. Johnson – and the same applies. It’s all about as contemporary as The Smiths, as hip as shoulder pads, as happening as Betamax video recorders. These are texts which are just coming to grips with the existence of rock music and television; they mostly do not dream even of the possibility of the technology and communications media – mobile phones, email, the internet, computers in every house powerful enough to put a man on the moon – which today’s undergraduates take for granted.

The reason why the primary reading on British postmodernism fictions modules is so old, in relative terms, is that it has not been rejuvenated. Just look out into the cultural market-place: buy novels published in the last five years, watch a twenty-first century film, listen to the latest music – above all just sit and watch television for a week – and you will hardly catch a glimpse of postmodernism. Similarly, one can go to literary conferences (as I did in July) and sit through a dozen papers which make no mention of Theory, of Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard. The sense of superannuation, of the impotence and the irrelevance of so much Theory among academics, also bears testimony to the passing of postmodernism. The people who produce the cultural material which academics and non-academics read, watch and listen to, have simply given up on postmodernism. The occasional metafictional or self-conscious text will appear, to widespread indifference – like Bret Easton Ellis’ Lunar Park – but then modernist novels, now long forgotten, were still being written into the 1950s and 60s. The only place where the postmodern is extant is in children’s cartoons like Shrek and The Incredibles, as a sop to parents obliged to sit through them with their toddlers. This is the level to which postmodernism has sunk; a source of marginal gags in pop culture aimed at the under-eights.
What’s Post Postmodernism?

I believe there is more to this shift than a simple change in cultural fashion. The terms by which authority, knowledge, selfhood, reality and time are conceived have been altered, suddenly and forever. There is now a gulf between most lecturers and their students akin to the one which appeared in the late 1960s, but not for the same kind of reason. The shift from modernism to postmodernism did not stem from any profound reformulation in the conditions of cultural production and reception; all that happened, to rhetorically exaggerate, was that the kind of people who had once written Ulysses and To the Lighthouse wrote Pale Fire and The Bloody Chamber instead. But somewhere in the late 1990s or early 2000s, the emergence of new technologies re-structured, violently and forever, the nature of the author, the reader and the text, and the relationships between them.

Postmodernism, like modernism and romanticism before it, fetishised [ie placed supreme importance on] the author, even when the author chose to indict or pretended to abolish him or herself. But the culture we have now fetishises the recipient of the text to the degree that they become a partial or whole author of it. Optimists may see this as the democratisation of culture; pessimists will point to the excruciating banality and vacuity of the cultural products thereby generated (at least so far).

Let me explain. Postmodernism conceived of contemporary culture as a spectacle before which the individual sat powerless, and within which questions of the real were problematised. It therefore emphasised the television or the cinema screen. Its successor, which I will call pseudo-modernism, makes the individual’s action the necessary condition of the cultural product. Pseudo-modernism includes all television or radio programmes or parts of programmes, all ‘texts’, whose content and dynamics are invented or directed by the participating viewer or listener (although these latter terms, with their passivity and emphasis on reception, are obsolete: whatever a telephoning Big Brother voter or a telephoning 6-0-6 football fan are doing, they are not simply viewing or listening).

By definition, pseudo-modern cultural products cannot and do not exist unless the individual intervenes physically in them. Great Expectations will exist materially whether anyone reads it or not. Once Dickens had finished writing it and the publisher released it into the world, its ‘material textuality’ – its selection of words – was made and finished, even though its meanings, how people interpret it, would remain largely up for grabs. Its material production and its constitution were decided by its suppliers, that is, its author, publisher, serialiser etc alone – only the meaning was the domain of the reader. Big Brother on the other hand, to take a typical pseudo-modern cultural text, would not exist materially if nobody phoned up to vote its contestants off. Voting is thus part of the material textuality of the programme – the telephoning viewers write the programme themselves. If it were not possible for viewers to write sections of Big Brother, it would then uncannily resemble an Andy Warhol film: neurotic, youthful exhibitionists inertly bitching and talking aimlessly in rooms for hour after hour. This is to say, what makes Big Brother what it is, is the viewer’s act of phoning in.

Pseudo-modernism also encompasses contemporary news programmes, whose content increasingly consists of emails or text messages sent in commenting on the news items. The terminology of ‘interactivity’ is equally inappropriate here, since there is no exchange: instead, the viewer or listener enters – writes a segment of the programme – then departs, returning to a passive role. Pseudo-modernism also includes computer games, which similarly place the individual in a context where they invent the cultural content, within pre-delineated limits. The content of each individual act of playing the game varies according to the particular player.

The pseudo-modern cultural phenomenon par excellence is the internet. Its central act is that of the individual clicking on his/her mouse to move through pages in a way which cannot be duplicated, inventing a pathway through cultural products which has never existed before and never will again. This is a far more intense engagement with the cultural process than anything literature can offer, and gives the undeniable sense (or illusion) of the individual controlling, managing, running, making up his/her involvement with the cultural product. Internet pages are not ‘authored’ in the sense that anyone knows who wrote them, or cares. The majority either require the individual to make them work, like Streetmap or Route Planner, or permit him/her to add to them, like Wikipedia, or through feedback on, for instance, media websites. In all cases, it is intrinsic to the internet that you can easily make up pages yourself (eg blogs).

If the internet and its use define and dominate pseudo-modernism, the new era has also seen the revamping of older forms along its lines. Cinema in the pseudo-modern age looks more and more like a computer game. Its images, which once came from the ‘real’ world – framed, lit, soundtracked and edited together by ingenious directors to guide the viewer’s thoughts or emotions – are now increasingly created through a computer. And they look it. Where once special effects were supposed to make the impossible appear credible, CGI frequently [inadvertently] works to make the possible look artificial, as in much of Lord of the Rings or Gladiator. Battles involving thousands of individuals have really happened; pseudo-modern cinema makes them look as if they have only ever happened in cyberspace. And so cinema has given cultural ground not merely to the computer as a generator of its images, but to the computer game as the model of its relationship with the viewer.

Similarly, television in the pseudo-modern age favours not only reality TV (yet another unapt term), but also shopping channels, and quizzes in which the viewer calls to guess the answer to riddles in the hope of winning money. It also favours phenomena like Ceefax and Teletext. But rather than bemoan the new situation, it is more useful to find ways of making these new conditions conduits for cultural achievements instead of the vacuity currently evident. It is important here to see that whereas the form may change (Big Brother may wither on the vine), the terms by which individuals relate to their television screen and consequently what broadcasters show have incontrovertibly changed. The purely ‘spectacular’ function of television, as with all the arts, has become a marginal one: what is central now is the busy, active, forging work of the individual who would once have been called its recipient. In all of this, the ‘viewer’ feels powerful and is indeed necessary; the ‘author’ as traditionally understood is either relegated to the status of the one who sets the parameters within which others operate, or becomes simply irrelevant, unknown, sidelined; and the ‘text’ is characterised both by its hyper-ephemerality and by its instability. It is made up by the ‘viewer’, if not in its content then in its sequence – you wouldn’t read Middlemarch by going from page 118 to 316 to 401 to 501, but you might well, and justifiably, read Ceefax that way.

A pseudo-modern text lasts an exceptionally brief time. Unlike, say, Fawlty Towers, reality TV programmes cannot be repeated in their original form, since the phone-ins cannot be reproduced, and without the possibility of phoning-in they become a different and far less attractive entity. Ceefax text dies after a few hours. If scholars give the date they referenced an internet page, it is because the pages disappear or get radically re-cast so quickly. Text messages and emails are extremely difficult to keep in their original form; printing out emails does convert them into something more stable, like a letter, but only by destroying their essential, electronic state. Radio phone-ins, computer games – their shelf-life is short, they are very soon obsolete. A culture based on these things can have no memory – certainly not the burdensome sense of a preceding cultural inheritance which informed modernism and postmodernism. Non-reproducible and evanescent, pseudo-modernism is thus also amnesiac: these are cultural actions in the present moment with no sense of either past or future.

The cultural products of pseudo-modernism are also exceptionally banal, as I’ve hinted. The content of pseudo-modern films tends to be solely the acts which beget and which end life. This puerile primitivism of the script stands in stark contrast to the sophistication of contemporary cinema’s technical effects. Much text messaging and emailing is vapid in comparison with what people of all educational levels used to put into letters. A triteness, a shallowness dominates all. The pseudo-modern era, at least so far, is a cultural desert. Although we may grow so used to the new terms that we can adapt them for meaningful artistic expression (and then the pejorative label I have given pseudo-modernism may no longer be appropriate), for now we are confronted by a storm of human activity producing almost nothing of any lasting or even reproducible cultural value – anything which human beings might look at again and appreciate in fifty or two hundred years time.

The roots of pseudo-modernism can be traced back through the years dominated by postmodernism. Dance music and industrial pornography, for instance, products of the late 70s and 80s, tend to the ephemeral, to the vacuous on the level of signification, and to the unauthored (dance much more so than pop or rock). They also foreground the activity of their ‘reception’: dance music is to be danced to, porn is not to be read or watched but used, in a way which generates the pseudo-modern illusion of participation. In music, the pseudo-modern supersedingof the artist-dominated album as monolithic text by the downloading and mix-and-matching of individual tracks on to an iPod, selected by the listener, was certainly prefigured by the music fan’s creation of compilation tapes a generation ago. But a shift has occurred, in that what was a marginal pastime of the fan has become the dominant and definitive way of consuming music, rendering the idea of the album as a coherent work of art, a body of integrated meaning, obsolete.

To a degree, pseudo-modernism is no more than a technologically motivated shift to the cultural centre of something which has always existed (similarly, metafiction has always existed, but was never so fetishised as it was by postmodernism). Television has always used audience participation, just as theatre and other performing arts did before it; but as an option, not as a necessity: pseudo-modern TV programmes have participation built into them. There have long been very ‘active’ cultural forms, too, from carnival to pantomime. But none of these implied a written or otherwise material text, and so they dwelt in the margins of a culture which fetishised such texts – whereas the pseudo-modern text, with all its peculiarities, stands as the central, dominant, paradigmatic form of cultural product today, although culture, in its margins, still knows other kinds. Nor should these other kinds be stigmatised as ‘passive’ against pseudo-modernity’s ‘activity’. Reading, listening, watching always had their kinds of activity; but there is a physicality to the actions of the pseudo-modern text-maker, and a necessity to his or her actions as regards the composition of the text, as well as a domination which has changed the cultural balance of power (note how cinema and TV, yesterday’s giants, have bowed before it). It forms the twenty-first century’s social-historical-cultural hegemony. Moreover, the activity of pseudo-modernism has its own specificity: it is electronic, and textual, but ephemeral.
Clicking In The Changes

In postmodernism, one read, watched, listened, as before. In pseudo-modernism one phones, clicks, presses, surfs, chooses, moves, downloads. There is a generation gap here, roughly separating people born before and after 1980. Those born later might see their peers as free, autonomous, inventive, expressive, dynamic, empowered, independent, their voices unique, raised and heard: postmodernism and everything before it will by contrast seem elitist, dull, a distant and droning monologue which oppresses and occludes them. Those born before 1980 may see, not the people, but contemporary texts which are alternately violent, pornographic, unreal, trite, vapid, conformist, consumerist, meaningless and brainless (see the drivel found, say, on some Wikipedia pages, or the lack of context on Ceefax). To them what came before pseudo-modernism will increasingly seem a golden age of intelligence, creativity, rebellion and authenticity. Hence the name ‘pseudo-modernism’ also connotes the tension between the sophistication of the technological means, and the vapidity or ignorance of the content conveyed by it – a cultural moment summed up by the fatuity of the mobile phone user’s “I’m on the bus”.

Whereas postmodernism called ‘reality’ into question, pseudo-modernism defines the real implicitly as myself, now, ‘interacting’ with its texts. Thus, pseudo-modernism suggests that whatever it does or makes is what is reality, and a pseudo-modern text may flourish the apparently real in an uncomplicated form: the docu-soap with its hand-held cameras (which, by displaying individuals aware of being regarded, give the viewer the illusion of participation); The Office and The Blair Witch Project, interactive pornography and reality TV; the essayistic cinema of Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock.

Along with this new view of reality, it is clear that the dominant intellectual framework has changed. While postmodernism’s cultural products have been consigned to the same historicised status as modernism and romanticism, its intellectual tendencies (feminism, postcolonialism etc) find themselves isolated in the new philosophical environment. The academy, perhaps especially in Britain, is today so swamped by the assumptions and practices of market economics that it is deeply implausible for academics to tell their students they inhabit a postmodern world where a multiplicity of ideologies, world-views and voices can be heard. Their every step hounded by market economics, academics cannot preach multiplicity when their lives are dominated by what amounts in practice to consumer fanaticism. The world has narrowed intellectually, not broadened, in the last ten years. Where Lyotard saw the eclipse of Grand Narratives, pseudo-modernism sees the ideology of globalised market economics raised to the level of the sole and over-powering regulator of all social activity – monopolistic, all-engulfing, all-explaining, all-structuring, as every academic must disagreeably recognise. Pseudo-modernism is of course consumerist and conformist, a matter of moving around the world as it is given or sold.

Secondly, whereas postmodernism favoured the ironic, the knowing and the playful, with their allusions to knowledge, history and ambivalence, pseudo-modernism’s typical intellectual states are ignorance, fanaticism and anxiety: Bush, Blair, Bin Laden, Le Pen and their like on one side, and the more numerous but less powerful masses on the other. Pseudo-modernism belongs to a world pervaded by the encounter between a religiously fanatical segment of the United States, a largely secular but definitionally hyper-religious Israel, and a fanatical sub-section of Muslims scattered across the planet: pseudo-modernism was not born on 11 September 2001, but postmodernism was interred in its rubble. In this context pseudo-modernism lashes fantastically sophisticated technology to the pursuit of medieval barbarism – as in the uploading of videos of beheadings onto the internet, or the use of mobile phones to film torture in prisons. Beyond this, the destiny of everyone else is to suffer the anxiety of getting hit in the cross-fire. But this fatalistic anxiety extends far beyond geopolitics, into every aspect of contemporary life; from a general fear of social breakdown and identity loss, to a deep unease about diet and health; from anguish about the destructiveness of climate change, to the effects of a new personal ineptitude and helplessness, which yield TV programmes about how to clean your house, bring up your children or remain solvent. This technologised cluelessness is utterly contemporary: the pseudo-modernist communicates constantly with the other side of the planet, yet needs to be told to eat vegetables to be healthy, a fact self-evident in the Bronze Age. He or she can direct the course of national television programmes, but does not know how to make him or herself something to eat – a characteristic fusion of the childish and the advanced, the powerful and the helpless. For varying reasons, these are people incapable of the “disbelief of Grand Narratives” which Lyotard argued typified postmodernists.

This pseudo-modern world, so frightening and seemingly uncontrollable, inevitably feeds a desire to return to the infantile playing with toys which also characterises the pseudo-modern cultural world. Here, the typical emotional state, radically superseding the hyper-consciousness of irony, is the trance – the state of being swallowed up by your activity. In place of the neurosis of modernism and the narcissism of postmodernism, pseudo-modernism takes the world away, by creating a new weightless nowhere of silent autism. You click, you punch the keys, you are ‘involved’, engulfed, deciding. You are the text, there is no-one else, no ‘author’; there is nowhere else, no other time or place. You are free: you are the text: the text is superseded.

© Dr Alan Kirby 2006

Alan Kirby holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Exeter. He currently lives in Oxford.

Mind Over Matter: An Eidetic Reduction presented in Dialogue

2009-06-10T09:54:00.001-07:00

PROLOGUE: In writing this dialogue, I wish to explore the ongoing debate within the philosophical community over the nature of thought, consciousness, matter, free will, and all such related concepts. This is, quite obviously, an immense topic, so I will attempt to keep the dialogue focused, especially on the concepts of qualia, phenomenology, and emergence. That said, brief escapades into religious, existential, and scientific thought will surely arise, as it would be foolish to take the debate and its implications out of context.

The characters are as follows: Victoria, an overbearingly secular materialist; Phoebe, a demure philosopher wont to take up any side of the debate but hesitant to believe any conclusion; and Brooke, a dedicated dualist, but unsure of the actual, precise nature of Being. The setting is the parlor of Phoebe’s winter lodge in the mountains, the time is quite anachronistic—the language and maturity of debate imply the late scientific revolution era, but certain evidentiary data employed by the characters are from a much later date. Such a merger of antiquated etiquette and modern science and technology is classically referred to as “steampunk”, but that is neither here nor there. Onward!,

LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION

BROOKE: […] you see then, Phoebe, the mind must be separate from the body! It is the only way in which these things may come to pass, our own experience confirms it.

PHOEBE: I simply will not and cannot take you at your word, Brooke. Your arguments at this moment do entice me, but, as certain as the tides, yet another will entreat me thusly ere the week be through. Words alone can do the subject no justice, I must conclude. Man is a fool to think he has power o’er the meand’ring follies of logic when approaching this matter. I--

BROOKE: --But do listen yourself, dear Phoebe! Clearly we are fools to think we have this thing concluded, but we must soldier onward. Most certainly we must. Indeed, this whole issue in and of itself seems evidence to me the very point which I wish to make clear: our minds, “spirits”, if you will, can see the picture clearly for what it is, yet they cannot communicate to this corporeal essence the complete logic of the thing. Petty details aside, do you not reach my same conclusion? That matter in and of itself simply cannot explain all that we experience, nay, cannot explain experience itself?

PHOEBE: It would seem, but I must maintain my reser—

VICTORIA: --And why, pray tell, can it not, Brooke?

PHOEBE: Victoria! Wonderful to see you again! What brings you to my humble lodgings?

VICTORIA: Why, the promise of this fine debate, of course. I would be a lesser person for having abstained from its luscious draw in the past, despite our momentary mutual ire immediately following. But now we have lost the train of the thing—Brooke, do explain!

BROOKE: I simply find it obvious, Victoria. The stones do not cry out, the tree does not ponder, even the lesser creatures do not concern themselves with the philosophical arguments and self-reflection which so dominate our thoughts. Dust is no source of feeling, and the dirt hath no consciousness—our minds are a precious commodity, rare in nature.

VICTORIA: You must see your error, Brooke. We are not stones, trees, or lesser creatures. Why should we expect them to think? We do not expect ourselves to be made of stone, grow leaves, or any other such qualities not becoming of a human being. We are unique, but it is no fault of anything other than the very arrangement of our molecules.

PHOEBE: But what, then, accounts for our experiences?

BROOKE: Yes, Victoria, what do you think of this thing called “qualia”?

VICTORIA: Explain if you would, please.

BROOKE: Well, the idea is that our experiences, our sensory data, have more than material considerations to it. The color red does more than simply transmit photons of a certain wavelength to our cornea, produce electrochemical reactions, and send a nerve impulse to our visual cortex where the information is processed and sent to the other parts of the brain as needed; there is a specific feeling and experience associated with this physical phenomena—one which cannot be explained materialistically.

PHOEBE: Here I am in agreement. We seem to know this intuitively: we speak of thoughts and feelings and emotions as completely separate concepts from our matter-based bodies. We have an idea of ourselves, our identity, not as a physical thing but as a thought-based entity, continuous through our physical maturation. Most every religion speaks of such concepts, be it a soul to be reincarnated or a pantheistic notion of oneness crossing material boundaries. Some are even wont to believe that we have no physical component at all, but are rather solely our thoughts!

VICTORIA: Ridiculous.

BROOKE: But how so?

VICTORIA: What evidence do they have for such doubts? Why believe these religious convictions? Utter nonsense.

BROOKE: What evidence do you have for the existence of the material world, Victoria? Although I do believe its existence as well, I find no foolproof reasoning for it. Our belief in it is based on experience, and these experiences, to my eyes, carry as much weight as our experiences with the non-material nature of our thoughts.

VICTORIA: What if I should say that your intuitive belief of non-material thought is simply cultural conditioning? Or, perhaps more accurately, a by-product of a language in which the words for thoughts, feelings, and emotions carry spiritual connotations and definitions? What if we should have words which conveyed these mind-states for what I believe they are—electrochemical patterns in an extremely complicated neural network? You say that there is something more to these “qualia”, some “experience” which cannot be communicated or explained with physical means, but I simply take that to be the shortcomings of scientific understanding. Neuroscientists say that when they stimulate certain areas of the brain, they can make someone perceive “spiritual transcendence” or any number of similar mind-states.

BROOKE: But the fact that electrochemical states of the brain can cause qualia experiences is not what I intend to question—indeed, my position requires it to be true. Otherwise, how would day to day phenomena ever affect our consciousness? The point I wish to make is that these experiences seem to be acting on a specific entity, continuous agent, which is receptacle to these qualia. But it would seem that my words even now can do it no justice. Perchance the idea of qualia is in and of itself a qualia, which I can no more communicate to you than you can communicate sight to the blind or sound do the deaf.

PHOEBE: As all knowledge seems to be, in my opinion. Language is but a hopeless attempt at communicating our beliefs with antiquated measures. Would that we all spoke in qualia.

BROOKE: Yes indeed. Anyway, Victoria, you must not mistake me for some old-fashioned dualist which derives all conclusions from religious conviction. I do see the importance of the material side of the issue. Indeed, I believe the “spirit” or “mind” to be fundamentally connected to and intertwined with the physical body to which it is ascribed.

VICTORIA: Ah yes, I was thinking of raising this point myself. It is good to hear that you do not ascribe to that ridiculous notion of a spiritual substance which resides above and beyond our world. Such ideas are foolishness.

PHOEBE: Why would you believe that, Victoria?

VICTORIA: There is no evidence for it, again! Ockham would be appalled.

PHOEBE: Once more we arrive at this conundrum. You seem to imply you have definitive evidence for the physical world where I can find none! But we will not go down that road again, believe you me. Instead think of my objection in this context: why would there not seem to be something above the physical world? If, indeed, the immaterial cannot interact with the material, we would see no evidence for it in our physical experience, so the absence of substantive evidence is quite the logical result. But of course that would have no effect on us, so we may consider it an inop’rable conclusion. Instead, we may consider that this nonmaterial substance only can causally interact with the physical world through the intuitive means of mind-body interaction.

VICTORIA: And what is this intuitive means? Physics quite strongly dictates that the only the physical can affect the physical. From whence arises this interaction?

PHOEBE: I do not know.

VICTORIA: Well then, I--

BROOKE: --Victoria, you raise a valid point: causal interaction between the material and immaterial seems nigh upon impossible, but what do you say to the concept of emergent consciousness and of “property dualism”?

VICTORIA: Oh, well, please do explain!

BROOKE: The idea is generally postulated as follows: that the properties of the mind, while completely reliant upon their material substrates, are irreducible to any specific aspect of these parts and must be treated as in their own category. In other words, the mind is more than the sum of its parts, and is not immaterial in the substance sense.

VICTORIA: I am intrigued, but hesitant to agree completely. Please do continue.

BROOKE: Well, truth be told, there are numerous different ways of phrasing the concept, each with its own specific connotations along with unique flaws and advantages. My personal preference is for that of, as I have already stated, emergent consciousness. I would argue that the specific arrangement of atoms and molecules to make up our neural pathways are so designed that, from their interactions, a “mind” emerges.

VICTORIA: I still do not quite understand. What do you mean, a “mind”? What do you mean, “emerges”? Because phrased as such one could take your statement to imply my original point: that our perceived consciousness is no fault of anything other than the very arrangement of our molecules.

BROOKE: Well, that point I must disagree with, so let me attempt to explain precisely. I guess I would say that each area of the brain is mapped to another area of thought or experience, such that the brain is the originator of all thought and emotion, but the specific thoughts and emotions which occur are not of the brain, but of the mind.

VICTORIA: I do not see the need for this mind to enter the picture, although I admit this concept is still infinitely more attractive to me than the other types of dualism you have presented in the past.

BROOKE: Again we return to my insistence upon a mind. I believe that the evidence for such a thing is unmistakable, but we have exhausted that topic most thoroughly, and will gain no further ground on it until one of us can think of a bridge between our two opinions. Perhaps this will serve as the bridge: it is typically called the “Chinese Room experiment”.

In one room, there sits a man with a massive book. In this book, every possible arrangement of Chinese characters is entered, and a consequent “response” is also listed. There is a slot in the wall of the room, through which another person will pass sheets of paper with Chinese characters inscribed upon them. The man with the book will look up the phrase given to him, and reply with the appropriate series of characters. To the person who first gave him the note, it would seem that this man is fluent in Chinese! However, we as an outside observer know that the man with the book has no idea what he’s reading or writing—he has simply been given an instruction manual which he follows precisely. We would never in our wildest imagination say that he understands Chinese. This dichotomy, between understanding and action, highlights the importance of consciousness to our very definition of understanding.

PHOEBE: In much the same way, we can imagine a person who acts functionally exactly the same as any other human, but has no consciousness or awareness of what he is doing. A veritable zombie walking among us!

BROOKE: Precisely. Once we see this concept of understanding as a distinct idea, the holes in materialism begin to appear.

VICTORIA: I am beginning to see it now, though I am wary. Would you then argue that intelligence and consciousness are inherent properties of matter? That any set of molecules can be rearranged such that they have a consciousness? That marble can be made flesh, and dust to spirit?

PHOEBE: I do not think so.

BROOKE: I, too, am hesitant to make such a conclusion.

VICTORIA: Well, I am still insistent upon that point. How, then, do you account for the fact that each of the atoms in your body is replaced constantly, such that you are never numerically identical even to yourself as you pass through time? It would seem that any old atom will do, so long as it retains its arrangement.

PHOEBE: Indeed, I believe that this only supports my refusal to say that the mind arises completely from matter, even given our new concept of emergence. It would seem that there must be something more to the issue; that there is some part of the mind which is separate, not affected by physical changes. What it would be, a God, a soul, or something else entirely, I daren’t even begin to postulate.

BROOKE: I do not know either. I do not wish to cement myself in one position before considerable thought. If I am to accept a substance-based dichotomy between matter and mind, as I was wont to do in my early days, then we arrive at the issue of causal relatedness. If I instead rely on property dualism, it is quite difficult indeed not to concede myself entirely to physicalism, but dread physicalism ignores all of my a priori and a posteriori concepts of consciousness, understanding, and qualia.

PHOEBE: Perchance the best hope is to return to substance dualism, but ignore the issue of causal relatedness?

BROOKE: Continue?

PHOEBE: What if you simply allow for the fact that the mind cannot affect the matter? That our experiences are properties of our minds, but the immaterial, as Victoria says, does not return the favor and affect the material

BROOKE: Well, then, what about how the material can affect the immaterial? It would seem that the same conundrum presents itself.

PHOEBE: So it does.

BROOKE: Of course, one can just postulate that the mind is of a particular substance such that it can interact with, i.e. act on and be acted upon, the material? To explain in a more plausible way, that the brain is one particular organ that has that possibility, accounting for the ways in which brain states can affect thought processes and vice versa?

VICTORIA: You can’t possibly be returning to substance dualism! For shame!

BROOKE: Forsooth, you are correct, Victoria: the beast continues to have its flaws. But it would seem that all do. Moving onward, I believe that if one finds the right way of defining property dualism, then we may satisfy all issues.

VICTORIA: Or just accept that qualia are illusory…

BROOKE: Have you listened to none of my arguments for it?

VICTORIA: And you none of mine?

PHOEBE: Indeed, you each argue well. But return to the idea at hand!

BROOKE: Certainly. Upon reflection, I believe that it is that concept which will be the saving grace of my predicament: ideas. What constitutes an idea? How is an idea stored in the brain? If one attempts to explain an idea in terms of physical states of matter, something is obviously lost. Above and beyond this lossy conversion, consider that this idea can be stored in countless of brains, each with a different structure, in handwritten documents, electronic programs, differing languages, perchance even in art! What, then, makes this infinitely variable physical arrangement of atoms constitute the same entity? Here we see emergence: abstraction. Contained within each of these things is an immaterial concept, one which is all but independent of its physical grounding. It cannot exist without its material basis, yet it is not the matter in and of itself which makes it what it is, just as it is not the brain which defines the mind, yet the mind requires a brain to exist. As this information is transferred between media, it can modulate in minutia, but remains ontologically irreducible. These variances in minutia can, in many ways, cause the meme to evolve and perfect itself, in a manner which could almost be mistaken for an external will, as is often mistakenly perceived in evolution. In other words, when the concept is read, thought about, and rewritten, it will have, in essence “altered” its physical makeup. In this way, the mind can also alter the physical actions of the brain—the mind, by receiving conceptual data, thinking about it, and resending it to the realm of physical properties, can affect the matter! I believe that this free will is not mistakenly perceived, but that is a debate for a different day entirely […]

END

EPILOGUE: Clearly, these formulations of young minds are far from perfection. However, I believe between the lines and between the characters, some minutia of truth resides. Clearly, Victoria represents a repentant Diderot (read backwards as “Tory did”, leading to Victoria), one who believes firmly in the materialist explanation of all reality, but is willing to at least accept other possibilities for the sake of debate. Phoebe, then, is a young Princess Elizabeth (“theba…” easily becomes “Phoebe”), doubting Descartes’ insistence upon causal interaction between mind and matter, but ever hungry for new ways of accounting for dualism’s allure. Brooke (from my own middle name) is the moderator between the voracious materialist and the doubtful dualist: she is fairly certain of her convictions, yet moderates them with a knowledge of her own lack of knowledge, and thusly treads bravely the thin alley of overlap between substance dualism and materialism. Brooke, representing most accurately my feelings on the issue, sees an immaterial world as inherent twin of the material world, and is convinced of the limits of human knowledge as not a hindrance upon thought, but rather a tool which can be used to invoke the necessity of something above and beyond what lies before us. As Brooke says in her conclusion of the dialogue, ideas continue beyond their origins in a manner which defies material constraint, and I hope that the ideas I have encoded into this document may spread and evolve to new minds, fertile with want of knowledge. Thank you for reading.

The Pillars of Thought

2009-06-07T15:57:00.001-07:00

The human mind is a curious thing. Its nature has been the subject of inquiry throughout philosophical history, spanning millennia. Whether this questioning was based on its capacities, its physical or immaterial make-up, or any other such qualia, humankind has had an innate desire to know and discover, above all else, the very methods and ways through which it can know and discover.

Core to the majority of this inquiry was a strategy and mode of thought known as “logic”, a mode of thought which seemed inherent to the human mind. Through a fundamental set of principles, pieces of information could be synthesized to form a conclusion, which by the very definition of logic, must be true if said principles were true. This system was formalized in Greek tradition, specifically through the work of Aristotle, but similar systems were being developed and formalized all over the world. As logic’s power grew and spread, it began to infect all other disciplines. Suddenly, any truth which did not withstand the withering gaze of logic’s due process was subject to skepticism, such as that practiced by followers of Pyrrhonism, or even flat out refusal.

This rigorous form of reasoning soon birthed a newly formalized mode of thought called “science”, wherein a system is recognized, a hypothesis is made about the specifics of its functionality, the consequents of said hypothesis are deduced, and experiments are run to see if the consequents are violated. Essentially, science became a new, formalized mode of thought for collecting evidentiary data about the world around us and predicting future occurrences based upon past observations. This evidently superior mode of thought became wildly popular both for its inherently elegant reasoning and for its controversial results such as Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. As the scientific revolution spread like wildfire throughout Europe in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, René Descartes came forward with a work entitled Discourse on Method. In this work, he lays out, among many other things including the famous “cogito ergo sum”, what he refers to as the “four rules of the method”. These four rules are not so much another formalization of the rules of logic, but rather a set of precepts on which Descartes believed the application of logical thought should be based. On the whole, the work is a successful one, but it makes a few key errors in its foundational principles that persist throughout and weaken many of its conclusions.

The first of the four rules of the method was essentially to never believe any false premises. As Descartes puts it, “never to accept anything as true that I did not plainly know to be such […] include nothing more in my judgments than what presented itself to my mind so clearly and so distinctly that I had no occasion to call it in doubt.” When a logical argument is constructed in a valid manner, the most common (indeed, likely the only) way to refute the conclusion is to deny the premises. If, as Descartes advises, the premises are accepted only after strenuous analysis and careful thought, then it becomes all the more difficult to arrive at a potentially faulty conclusion.

The second of these rules is “to divide each of the difficulties I would examine into as many parts as possible and as was required in order better to resolve them.” This is less a specific logical stratagem but moreso a general approach to thought. If one can take a large concept and break it down into its component pieces, analyze each of these pieces individually so as to understand them in a fuller capacity, then when the concept is reconstructed it can be more easily understood as a whole.[1]

The third of the rules is to progress naturally through the component pieces of an idea or train of thought, beginning with the simplest and building slowly towards the most complex by means of small steps of logic. In this manner, as with the second step, each small bit of information can be duly processed and understood before moving on to the next, more complex step. This rule also makes sure that one does not have any errors in the ordering of premises or logical steps, as this would make the argument or line of thought hard to follow, both for the thinker and a potential outside observer.

The fourth and final of the rules of method is “everywhere to make enumerations so complete and reviews so general that [one is assured] of having omitted nothing.” This rule attempts to emulate the scientific method in the sense that the process is repeated over and over again through review such that any flaws are revealed and consequently addressed. The hope is that the human mind is capable of spotting errors and omissions that were made the first time through the argument and then correcting them.

Despite the overall quality of these rules and their strength in most instances of thought process, it is here in the fourth rule that the general flaw of the method begins to become apparent. This assumption—that an observer can always find every flaw and omission in the argument—is not entirely accurate. While it certainly is common for one person to be able to see the problems in another’s arguments when the arguer cannot see them, this does not guarantee that every flaw will be exposed, or even that every flaw is apprehensible by the human mind. This oversight runs throughout the four rules: a fundamental inability to conceive of modes of thought which do not follow logical processes and as such are not subject to logical rules.

When one inspects the foundation of logical thought, doubting all of its claims in much the same manner as Descartes’ line of thought which lead him to “cogito ergo sum”, he or she is left with one major foundational assumption on which logic is based: that logic is a functional system. The rules on which logic are based have no inherent, provable truth value to them, and as such are doubtable premises. This structure on which logic is built essentially boils down to a system of circular reasoning, providing its own definitions and set of tools with which it suggest one observe its validity; i.e., logic is a valid system only by the rules of logic. While I do not personally believe that it is beneficiary or even “right” to doubt the validity of logic, it is important to note the possibility of its short comings, which Descartes fails to do. Descartes seems to have his own reasoning for this absence of doubt, but again, he arrives at this certainty through a logical train of thought, which again dodges the issue entirely (indeed, it seems to be a logical fallacy on the order of petito principia, not to mention his specific use of argumentum ad populum).

This circular reasoning system is an important concept to recognize as inherent in every mode of thought—science, logic, and faith—and as such, not a destructively negative condition, but one that should always be remembered. Science, the mode of thought which makes predictions based upon models crafted from previous experiences, is only used because when it has been used in the past (previous experiences), its predictions have been correct. As such, the scientific method is a scientific model. The reasoning of faith, belief in that which cannot be arrived at through logic or science, is circular in much the same ways: in the end, there is no foundational proof for its validity, but there are a few fundamental precepts on which it is placed.

When one does not accept the circular nature of reasoning systems, and instead tries to fit the entirety of truth under one lens, under one mode of thought, then errors are quick to arise. This is especially evident in Descartes’ attempts to logically prove the existence of God. God, above all else, has classically been a concept taken as an article of faith, and for good reason: the task of proving through logic a being which is all-powerful, prior to time, and immaterial is a difficult one indeed. Great philosophers throughout history, however, have tried, with varying degrees of success, to fit God into the lens with which they are most comfortable: philosophy and logical thought.

For these reasons, Descartes’ specific arguments for God fail from the outset, but they are also relatively weak even within the history of logical proofs of God. They even violate a few of Descartes’ own Four Rules of Method. From the outset in his first gesture towards a proof of God, he makes a number of assumptions which would clearly violate the first rule: that “things we conceive very clearly and very distinctly are all true”, that “it is a greater perfection to know than to doubt”, and that being able to imagine something more perfect than one’s self is proof of something more perfect than one’s self. Each of these is refutable after quick deliberation, despite the fourth rule that each process should be thoroughly reviewed for errors such as these. What, for instance, if those things which we believe to see “very clearly” are indeed not at all true, and that notion of seeing them clearly is a false perception, one of the very false perceptions he doubted to arrive at “cogito ergo sum”? There seems to be no evidence or reasoning behind this belief other than personal faith. The following point, that it is greater to know than to doubt, seems to be slightly more reasonable, but still could be questioned on a number of levels. The final premise of his proof, that imagination proves existence, is immediately questionable. His decision “to search for the source from which I had learned to think of something more perfect than I was, and I plainly knew that this had to be from some nature that was in fact more perfect” assumes that for an idea to be present in one’s head, it must have a reasonable source, is flawed on many many levels. Human beings are eminently capable of envisioning things which do not exist and have no root in the reality around us, and this ability does not at all prove the existence of unicorns or martians.

As such, Descartes’ Discourse on Method is a flawed logical and philosophical work, but is still, despite my critiques, largely successful in its aims. Indeed, although it fails to acknowledge modes of thought other than logic, it defines the philosophical lens very effectively and reasonably. His proof of “cogito ergo sum” is also profoundly famous for good reason—it is an essentially perfect logical proof of existence above all else, from which a vast majority of western thought has arisen. Once the Discourse on Method is taken in this lighter context—as a high quality work of logic, but a work which does not in any way disprove the other modes of thought—its imperfections can be glossed over and that which remains is quite solid, or, as Descartes puts it, one can “cast aside the shifting earth and sand in order to find rock or clay”.

[1] Although the rebuttal to this point will not be discussed at length in this paper, it should be noted that this rule fails to recognize the possibility of some points which cannot be broken into component pieces, points which become more complex when broken up, or points in which the “whole is greater than the sum of its parts”

Mass(ively Available) Media: The End of the Lowest Common Denominator

2009-02-08T22:30:00.001-08:00

One of the greatest driving forces in human progress is the increased mobility of data and objects. The horse. The chariot. The boat. Writing. Currency. The train. Telegraph. Radio. The car. The plane. The space shuttle. The internet. With increased mobility, the price of interaction with others decreases, allowing for increased profits resultant from external investment. Larger and larger social webs develop and strengthen, and here we sit, reading blogs on the World Wide Web.

When nearly the entire planet can create culture and media (the driving force behind "web 2.0") and share it instantly, there is enough out there to satisfy even the most ravenous collector. However, because data can move so rapidly, it becomes ubiquitous. "Spam", or unwanted data, flourishes. Tools which allow people to filter out such unwanted memes become increasingly attractive, which is why we have Google and gated neighborhoods. With the right filters in place, one can "stumble through" page after meme after blog after video after social network devoted to nearly any topic.

As such, niche cultures quickly form. Joseph from Albuquerque, NM used to think he was the only person in the US who loved old B-studio horror flicks. Now he chats regularly with DontGoIntoTheWoods and NailGun1985 over an Instant Messaging service. This has been an absolute boon for independent artists. When the only way to experience music was either going to a local live show, buying a professionally printed LP or listening to the radio, you had to be able to appeal to a wide audience to merit the investment of a record label. The label, then, would print up your record, put out a few ads, send it to radio, and hope that they were right when they thought everyone would like you. When anyone can upload a track they record in their basement with their laptop built-in microphone and a open-source multi-track audio recorder and have it tagged with the appropriate genre-related metadata, the fans can find you.

This is kind of like free trade. The textbook argument for free trade goes as follows: when countries are allowed to trade freely, they will specialize in what they are best at, and trade it for whatever they need. As such, more of everything/better everything is made, and people's consumption frontiers expand. This applies quite easily to creative endeavors: when everyone can make what they're really good at, and find an open market without the big-corporate-studio "tariffs" of entry, people will specialize, the market will diversify, and everyone will be able to consume more, better product. (If you want to know what I actually think of free trade as it is typically meant in current political discourse, you can read some of my other posts, but I digress)

This is why last.fm, which tracks users' listening habits when they install a plug-in on their media players, has charts (MGMT, Andrew Bird, Glasvegas, Rogue Wave, Fleet Foxes) which read quite differently from the top singles on mass-market radio (Beyonce, TI feat. Rihanna, Kanye West, Britney Spears, Katy Perry). To generalize, everyone can listen to and at least partially enjoy Kanye. Not everyone can listen to and at least partially enjoy Andrew Bird. But, with piratebay.org, last.fm, pandora, myspace music, youtube, and the rest of the plethora of online music sites, everyone at least has the chance to know about Mr. Bird should they know how to look.

Now, Mass Media is not going to die. At least not any time soon. But what more and more people are beginning to realize is that Mass Media is not really so massive. Not too many people actually actively listen to Miley Cyrus. People are beginning to find that there's music out there that they like more than what appeals to their lowest common denominator, if they invest a little time, effort, and emotion into it.

Of course, then the resulting question is: where do we go from here? Not to cop-out, but we really don't know. Well, at least we don't know the specifics. But, if we step back and blur the picture a little bit, I think we can expect a few trends to emerge which have really been there all along.

Poets Within: Lessons from Aboriginal Songlines

2008-12-28T22:32:00.001-08:00

“Men vent great passions by breaking into song, as we observe in the most grief-stricken and the most joyful”

-Vico, The New Science, LIX

The history of music is perhaps the most complex and compelling history we have, both as a species and as a planet. It is inextricably linked to life and death, sorrow and joy, that which we think of when we think of our existence. Man has used song for a very long time, perhaps even before spoken language. Other animals, such as birds and whales, use it as their language when, as far as we can tell, they have no actual words. In the Aboriginal culture, this potential of music is realized, with the entire existence of the universe hanging on the notes of the songlines.

Man’s first written songs were religious chants, and this directly ties into one of the most important uses of music. The songs were religious tribute to the world around them, acknowledgement of a spiritual connection above the confines of the physical. Aboriginals use song in much the same way: each song is a tribute to a certain trail of land, a certain ancestor, and a certain species. These trails of song, called songlines, run throughout the entirety of Australia, creating an infinitely complex web of different ideas. As Bruce Chatwin notes on page 13 of Songlines, “In theory, at least, the whole of Australia could be read as a musical score […] One should perhaps visualize the Songlines as a spaghetti of Iliads and Odysseys, writhing this way and that, in which every ‘episode’ was readable in terms of geology.” Each songline has its own distinct melody, relating to the story of the ancestor, so each member of the clan, while not knowing the whole story, can recognize his song even if the words are different. In this way, every person in Australia is tied together through clan relations, the links between maintainers of specific songlines, and tribe relations, the people that the person lives and travels with.

These multi-layered webs very much reflect the effects of music on our lives today. We all are deeply connected with song: it can take us on journeys very few other endeavors can, even within the arts. We are defensive of the music we feel attached to, as evidenced in the heated battles between students over which musicians and songs are better that others that go on in the halls of high schools every day. This is closely related to the Aboriginal idea of the songline: we feel like certain pieces of music are our own, under our watchful eye, and we must protect their integrity from all intruders. We feel an instant connection with others who share our musical interests, much like an Aboriginal would feel connected to his clan mate. This is the purpose of religious hymns and national anthems: to link the people through common song. And these pieces that we call our own are profoundly blended into our minds and hearts. There are songs that bring tears to my eyes every time I hear them: they can communicate on so many levels that our conscious mind cannot begin to understand.

Even with the study of music, one never can really find why certain melodies and harmonies affect certain people so deeply; why Sibelius’s Karelia suite is more moving to me than even the most complex arrangements of Hot Cross Buns. What is this driving force behind music that entangles itself within us? From the purely physical view, all music is simply rapid changes in pressure of air, which moves our eardrums in extremely fast pulses. These pulses are converted to streams of electric signals and sent to our brains. What can we derive from this? What knowledge can we gain from it? It brings to mind the question of all our experiences: they are all electrical impulses interpreted by our brains. The most interesting of paintings is, on the most simplistic level, just a certain pattern of atoms that release light waves with different frequencies. However, something in there, some certain arrangement touches us, moves us.

One of the first things that totalitarian societies ban is music and the arts. Behind the Iron Curtain, jazz and rock were not allowed to be performed. In the 1800s, slave owners disallowed the slaves from owning musical instruments. To have a drum or be seen beating a drum was punishable by beating or death. This need for control is in fact just a backhanded recognition of the power of the human spirit of creativity. To control the masses, the leaders must ban all individuality and expression, to the point where the people have no will to fight back. Music is a huge player in this aspect of human consciousness, and is punished accordingly. However, the need for song is often so great that the oppressed will rise above the restrictions, breaking this law more than most others, to make music. The spirituals sung by the slaves are still with us today, and the jazz and blues of New Orleans live on. Through control, the slave owners simply made the spirit all the more desperate to break out, to pull song from the mind and heart into being. These hymns are some of the most powerful harmonies of all, for they were created in the heat of struggle. They can speak to us much more than through their words alone.

My compositional teacher has a severely autistic son by the name of Michael. Michael cannot speak, can barely move, and is confined to his room for the majority of the day. However, he is amazingly responsive to music. When the speakers start to vibrate with the sounds of Holst or Liszt, he often cries out, reacting to the harsher harmonies and rhythms. He can sense changes in the music before they occur, as if hidden in each tone is a story of what is to come. However, when you put on some of his favorite songs, he instantly is pacified. He will begin nodding and humming along, seemingly without a care in the world.

This essentially sums up what we all find in music: a sense of escape, while at the same time, a sense of connection. We are taken on journeys, yet reminded of the web we have between each and every thing around us. Every person, whether a composer or not, has song inside them. As Saul Williams states in his song “Black Stacey”, “I plan to have a whole army by the time that I'm through; to load their guns with songs they haven't sung.” He also states in “Fearless” that, “I am a poet who composes what the world proses, and proses what the world composes.” This is what we all are, whether we do it through song, dance, painting, writing, or even just thinking. Each of us has that history of creation deep inside of us, waiting to burst through the earth into being.

Democracy and Diplomats: A Primer on India-US relations (circa '05)

2008-12-23T21:48:00.001-08:00

“There have been few countries more worthy of America's friendship than India. India has taken the American side on crucial geopolitical issues such as missile defense and containing China. It has emerged as a vital economic partner, sending tens of thousands of its citizens to work in high-tech jobs in the United States and attracting billions of dollars of investments from American companies. And, perhaps most importantly, India has fully subscribed to the political ideal to which the United States subscribes: It is a multiethnic, multireligious society; a vibrant democracy--indeed the world's largest democracy--thriving in a part of the world that is woefully unaccustomed to such freedoms.”[1] Despite this, ever since India’s independence and subsequent wars with Pakistan over Kashmir, their relations with the US have been shaky.

One would think that two largest democracies on the planet would be able to get along, especially when both are interested in similar things and have similar histories. Both the US and India were once part of the British empire, and both broke away to form democratic societies founded on the ideals of personal freedom and justice. However, after all the similarities, they are constantly having small scuffles, much like a sibling rivalry. The common belief is also that democracies are peaceful governments, only interested in spreading freedom and justice to the rest of the world. Why then, do the USA and India have such a troubled relationship? They do because they come from different eras of world power alignments, and have populations with different ideals and goals.

The US, although a very young country compared to Europe and to other regions, it still very much follows the old world order of Europe maintaining dominance over the rest of the planet. India, however, gained its independence in the mid-1900s, after the two world wars, and thus came into being under a vastly different circumstance. European powers were starting to release their colonies, and were preaching “self-determination” to the rest of the world. India took this very much to heart, and had few qualms attempting to overthrow the European countries for world power. This attempt has yet to pay off, but is bound to soon enough. As reported by the New Statesman, “The National Intelligence Council, which pools thinking from all US intelligence agencies including the CIA and the National Security Council, has just published Mapping the Global Future, a report by the council's 2020 Project. Its main prediction is that the 21st century will belong to China and India.”[2]

One main aspect of the differences between the United States and India is their economic struggles with each other. Recently in the US, many people have become concerned about “outsourcing” jobs to other countries, thus depriving Americans of work and raising the unemployment rate. However, what most American’s don’t realize is that it is not just their own jobs that are disappearing, but the jobs in every country. As discussed by Geoffrey Colvin, reporter for Fortune, “The election foofaraw [sic] over manufacturing jobs going to China--a hot-button issue in every swing state but Florida--was always nonsensical. The overriding reality isn't that manufacturing jobs are being exported but that they're evaporating everywhere, including China, as makers of everything become more productive.”[3] And it is not only businesses in the United States that are hiring outside of their own country. A major German software company, SAP, has recently erected a research and development center in Bangalore, India.[4]

The main reason for this wave of outsourcing is that Indians are nearly to just as well trained, but cost a fraction as much to hire. As pointed out by Time Magazine, “R. and D. in India may prove to be too good a bargain to ignore: the cost of developing a basic software product in India is about $2 million, or just 40% of the cost in the U.S.”[5]

India’s rise to the economic spotlight has been a long and troublesome one. Since their independence in 1947, they have been a relatively poor country. As said in The Economist, “At best, India has been a qualified political success and a barely qualified economic failure […] 320m Indians remain below the poverty line today, almost as many as India's entire population was in 1947. A mistaken socialist experiment has cost India dear.”[6] Upon India’s independence, they began a shift towards socialism. Thinking capitalism to have failed, and the evidence thereof being the two World Wars, they took the USSR as a great model for alternatives to capitalism. The Soviets industrialized and experienced a rapid growth in GDP as a result of their five-year plans, so the Indians adopted similar socialism-based economic systems. They began by depriving the feudal lords of their lands and giving the land to the peasants, and industrializing. Soon this spread to nationalization of corporations, and state intervention in private business. Even after Soviet Russia fell, the Indians continued their series of five-year plans. However, they began to go bankrupt. In 1977 they were forced to relax controls and re-privatize business. This lead to a general upward trend in GDP, but was still short of what India could achieve.[7] Since then, India has become an even more open economy, leading to monetary input from various countries both in terms of import/export relations, and in hiring overseas.

This influx of job transfers to the subcontinent could just be the solution that many have been waiting for. With an investment upwards of $9 billion just from the United States, and a reformed, open economy, one can expect India to be a very significant economic force in the years to come.

The United States is also very involved in India’s political affairs, especially when it comes to the famed dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir. The interest stems mainly from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), an incarnation of the United States’ long held view of limiting and controlling nuclear weapons. Both India and Pakistan, as of the 1970s, are countries outside of the NPT holding nuclear armaments. Delhi has long viewed the limiting of nuclear arms as hypocritical, claiming that all countries should destroy all their nuclear bombs. As such, when the superpowers would not agree to mutual worldwide destruction of advanced weaponry, India began and continued production of nuclear arms. Many critics of India have stated that Delhi’s nuclear program is simply an attempt to get a jump-start into world-power status. However, no amount of criticism can take away the fact that an arms race has begun between India and its long-time rival, Pakistan. Both countries have realized this, as evidenced by their continual swap of a list of nuclear production sites each new year.[8] However, neither country is doing anything to stop weapons buildup from continuing.[9]

As pointed out by The Economist, “If a new arms race does start, it will mark a return to the situation of the 1980s. Then, America poured billions of dollars of weapons into Pakistan, its frontline ally against Soviet forces in Afghanistan. India too went on an arms splurge, spending about $7 billion on Swedish howitzers and Soviet tanks and fighters. But when the Soviet Union left Afghanistan, America stopped winking at Pakistan's nuclear programme and cut off arms aid. That was in line with a law, the Pressler amendment, forbidding arms sales to countries going nuclear”[10] India has long had a problem with US weapons sales to Pakistan, citing the investment as a clear signal of favoring Islamabad in the conflict. However, Pakistan is not so much an ally of ideals and values as an ally of convenience, being almost essential for America’s goals in the Middle East.[11] Politicians on Capitol Hill have long tried to balance aid to the two countries, promising sales of certain arms to one in response to sales of relatively equal amounts to the other. Despite this, both countries still see the US as on the other one’s side.

In fact, the US is truly on both sides: it has long played a mediator role in the conflict between the two, especially in regards to Kashmir. As stated in The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, “As a matter of both short-term strategy and long-range U.S. policies, it clearly is in Washington's interest to rein in the subcontinent's two nuclear-powered rivals, India and Pakistan. This, however, is not an easy task, given the imbalances between the two countries and their endemic disputes and mistrusts.”[12] For a long time, Capitol Hills plans of mutual deterrence of arms did not work. Recently, though, planned peace talks have begun to settle the issue of Kashmir. Preceding the talks, US deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott visited each country to revisit common issues regarding their relationships with each other and with the United States.[13] Soon peace talks independent of the United States began. A cease-fire in the region of Kashmir was announced November 2004, and peace talks were planned for this February of 2005.[14]

Many other interesting aids to the Kashmir issue have been suggested. One such idea, as reported by UPI NewsTrack, is an oil pipeline connecting the two countries. “[Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat] Aziz said that a gas pipeline to connect India with Iran via Pakistan and a move to open banking links were among possible measures which could improve relations.”[15]

After all of the struggle within India-United States Relations, what will come of them? And why does this all matter? It matters because, as the Mapping the Global Future report referenced earlier stated, the 21^st century will not be another century of American dominance. It will be a century of gradual erosion of American prowess and a gradual increase in the influence of India and other south-east Asian countries. If the US plans to have any chance in the upcoming years, it needs to found strong relationships with tomorrow’s key players today.

[1] “Friends. (India, Pakistan, United States relations).” The New Republic Jan 14, 2002: 7.

[2] Hilsum, Lindsey. “World view: the 21st century, say US analysts, will not be American. It will belong to China and India, and it may bring a cyberspace caliphate that commands Muslim loyalty across the world.” New Statesman Jan 24, 2005: 16.

[3] Colvin, Geoffrey. “Think your job can’t be sent to India? Just watch. (Value Driven).” Fortune Dec 13, 2004: 80.

[4] Adiga, Aravind, Matthew Forney and Jyoti Thottam “The New Idea Labs: As more firms send research to India and China, could the U.S. fall behind?” Time Jan 31, 2005: A6.

[5] Ibid.

[6] “Happy anniversary? (politics and economy of India).” The Economist August 16, 1997: 17.

[7] Ibid.

[8] “India, Pakistan swap nuke plants list.” United Press International Jan 1, 2003: 1008001w0320.

[9] “Race to the finish; Warheads and missiles. (What's in the Indian and Pakistani stockpiles).” The Economist Jan 19, 2002.

[10] “More weapons, please: India and Pakistan. (arms buildup).” The Economist Dec 16, 1995: 34.

[11] “Friends. (India, Pakistan, United States relations).” The New Republic Jan 14, 2002: 7.

[12] Ali, M. M. “With U.S. prodding behind the scenes, confidence-building measures continue.” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs Jan-Feb 2005: 37.

[13] “Progress, perhaps: America, India and Pakistan.” The Economist April 16, 1994: 36.

[14] Adiga, Aravind, Aryn Baker, Ghulam Hasnain and Alex Perry. “A Glimmer of Hope: After decades of darkness, can the peace talks planned between India and Pakistan save Kashmir?” Time International (Asia Edition) Jan 19, 2004: 14.

[15] “India-Pakistan relations hinge on pipeline. (UPI Top Stories).” UPI NewsTrack Jan 31, 2005: NA.

Free Riders, Bystanders, and the Game Theory of International Relief

2008-12-03T19:47:00.000-08:00

Throughout the multiple moral theories of international capital flow, I believe a dimension of analysis has been conspicuously absent: that of the Game-Theoretic approach. We read about lifeboat ethics, capital paradoxes, and utilitarian foreign aid. However, none of these approaches or analyses manages to fully capture the nature by which people make decisions about how to invest their money. Specifically, none look at the issue of international capital investment as an economic game with huge non-zero-sum factors and potential externalities. As such, in this post I will attempt to view a few different moral arguments about international capital through a game-theoretic lens and attempt to figure out what each position truly advocates, and what the implications are of each.

We shall begin with a discussion of Garrett Hardin’s article, “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor.” The article’s premise is based on the Malthusian Dilemma: that as population is allowed to increase, quality of life decreases due to the increased demand for resources, increasing death rates and reducing birth rates so as to return population to a sustainable level. Hardin takes this principle and applies it to international aid to the poor and states that getting people out of impoverished conditions increases world population by decreasing the crude death rate, driving populations above a sustainable level.

The strongest non-normative rebuttal to this argument in my view is that of using technology to increase the earth’s sustainable capacity. Physically and psychologically, humans have evolved to only be able to handle small social tribes. However, advances in technology (agriculture, infrastructure, etc.) and politics (larger states streamlining socioeconomic efficiency) have allowed humankind to expand far beyond “natural” levels. Indeed, one prominent economic historian, Gregory Clark, says that the Industrial Revolution was a pivotal techno-political event in which industry advances were finally able to outpace natural population control forces (see A Farewell to Alms). This is also the central thesis of the book Nonzero: the Logic of Human Destiny by Robert Wright, which states that all cultures evolve to take advantage of the larger and larger social webs, increasing their potential non-zero-sum gain. Those cultures which cannot cope with larger populations and social webs are eliminated by those who can outcompete them by taking advantage of the most non-zero-sum gain possible.

If we accept that the earth can and will reach a point where it can sustain higher populations, then we are open to normative arguments for why we should help the poor of other countries. An extreme example of this argument is found in Peter Singer’s 1972 article, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” in which he argues that rich persons should give money to the poor until such giving would decrease net happiness. While this may be impractical in the minds of many for a number of reasons (corruption, impartiality, and fostering of dependency), it also leaves the question of the capital paradox: if the earth can sustain more people, and it’s right to do so (both morally and financially, due to increasing returns on capital in impoverished nations), why aren’t more people investing in the poor?

Here, I believe, we arrive at the bystander effect and free rider problems. These two theories of behavior amount to the same concept: that it is very difficult to be the first person to do something, even in cases of crisis, because one believes that others will take care of the situation instead. In the crisis of international poverty, we believe in the vicious cycle as follows: “if it was the right thing to, someone would be doing it by now.” As such, few ever begin to give significant amounts of international aid.

Another game-theoretic issue we come upon in this issue is the Prisoner’s Dilemma: specifically, the temptation to “cheat” the other player out of utility by “defecting”. Specifically in this case, we see that people see more short-term personal and social-group (i.e., national) gain by keeping their money or refusing to invest in businesses abroad, at the expense of long-term, world-wide benefit.

Throughout the study of International Relations and Political Theory, we have seen that the role of governments is to overcome dilemmas such as these through law and cultivation of new norms so that people will act in the most beneficial way possible. As such, I believe that it is up to public international aid organizations and governments to increase the levels of aid. Only when the temptations to “stay home” in a free-rider situation and “defect” in a prisoner’s dilemma are removed (by law-made incentives, punishments, or new norms) will people be able to overcome the free rider problem bystander effect and prisoner’s dilemma and begin to reap the non-zero-sum gains of international investment and humanitarian aid.

The Myth of the Myth of Obama

2008-11-17T09:50:00.001-08:00

"Young people who may not be interested in the details of NAFTA or foreign policy just think Obama is cool, and they're interested in him. Being cool can really help a new president."

How do so many people misunderstand what happened over the last 11 months, culminating on November 4th? The number of ridiculous articles I've read on the "obama complex" his "messianic self-image", his "pop-culture status", hell, even McCain's "Celebrity" commercial... it truly sickens me.

So here's what happened: 61 million people did not "drink the Kool Aid". The youth of the nation did not get wool pulled over their eyes by some hip half-black man. No, this country took a long, hard look at itself, and bought into each other.

People realized that their destinies were shared destinies, their dreams connected. Not in some neo-Marxist "Obama is such a socialist because he wants to return some tax rates to where they were 8 years ago and cut the rest" sort of way, but a true, honest, recognition of the vast cultural, economic, sociopolitical web that ties all of us in this nation together.

As Wright explains in his fantastic book "Nonzero", the arrow of history drives all cultures towards increased interdependence and win-win outcomes of non-zero-sum games. The internet and globalization are the two main interances of this drive, and as such it is no coincidence that Obama is known for his utilization of the web.

The people of this nation stepped back from the last 8 years, saw what "greed is good" can do to this country, and, as has happened so often in American history, chose a new direction: one that promises what was promised to all in our declarative document: life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.

Unity: A Definition

2008-11-02T20:57:00.000-08:00

so, in the spirit of the hour, here's a blog I wrote back before Super Tuesday:

February 4th. The day when I solidified what I had been trying to make certain for so long: my dedication to this man and his message. My belief in a world beyond the valley of despair too commonly known as American politics. The place: Bay Area, California. The time: 11 PM. As a student, I had many menial tasks on my plate at the beginning of the week, but I knew that if February 6th came around and there was one thing that I had left on the table, one moment where I had convinced myself that "that's enough, it'll be well enough without me", I would have failed. Looking back on it now, we may have lost Santa Clara county, but the margins were thin. And we won every district where I worked.

What work was this, you ask? This work was the work of the night. The kind of underground movement that is only suited for the early morning hours, when the cool brisk air gives the adrenaline-charged minds that shot of electricity that can only come from an all-nighter. The kind of energy that stems from the knowledge, held by all involved, that we were changing America. In what way we could, we were laying the bricks of the road to tomorrow.

We flyered and chalked, signplanted and postered, until not a view could be held without Obama's face in sight. Come sunrise, we made our way to a busy intersection and held aloft our homemade signs, pleading people to VOTE FOR CHANGE and other such slogans which in their deepest of moments can not even begin to express what truth lays behind them. As traffic picked up, we were invigorated beyond belief. Honk after honk after honk filled the roads, thumbs up and grins were in no short supply. I could feel it like I had never felt it before: what Obama had said so many times yet I had not reached out enough, not extended my hand into the consciousness of the masses enough to feel it: there was something happening in America.

And never was this moment truer than when a young black man pulled up beside me in his run-down honda with a latino friend in the passenger seat. To cheapen them to such stereotypes defiles the moment, but the fact of their complete annonymity to me proves beyond all else the timeless importance of their message. The driver looked into my eyes questioningly, as he could not see the front of my sign and knew not what I was protesting or advertising. Seeing his confusion, I turned my sign towards the car and all of a sudden his eyes lit up. The widest of grins I have ever seen thundered across his face as he recognized the words. He reached down to his jacket and tugged at his chest, pointing to a small round button pinned there with pride. "Obama". His window was closed and we could exchange no words, but there were no words that could do it justice. He was trying with all his might, desperate to express in what short time he had the otherworldly, urgent sentiment:

"I, too, believe."

Reckoner Remix

2008-10-24T21:50:00.001-07:00

Vote it up vote it up!

2008-09-24T15:39:00.000-07:00

We don't solve issues by refusing to hold debates--the debates should be a platform to explain how economic visions would help the economy. McCain is clearly doing 3 things here:
1. Trying to shake up the race because he's down significantly in the polls (like the Palin pick)
2. Removing himself from the public discourse on the economy due to his horribly mixed messaging on the subject over the last week
3 Playing on people's suspicion of campaigning as dishonest as opposed to staying in DC. A leader can do both and stay appropriately earnest

I guess when your idea of campaigning is running ads saying your opponent supports sexual education for kindergarteners, suspending a campaign is a noble act.

But for candidates who use their place in the public eye to display leadership and push forward policy proposals, stopping a campaign is a faliure to do one's duty.
--sent from my phone

VP Palin--a lesson in pandering

2008-08-29T14:39:00.000-07:00

Palin?

Yea, Palin. The mayor of a 6000 person town-turned-half-a-term governor. That Palin.

I guess the experience narrative is over for the McCain campaign (despite some hilarious attempts by the right-wing talking heads to spin her experience as "executive" and therefore more valuable than Biden's and Obama's combined, even when it somes to sitting down with Iran).

Here's the message McCain sends with this pick: "Dear disgruntled feminist supporters of Hillary Clinton. I know that the real reason you supported the New York senator was not her lifetime of fighting for Democratic issues, it was the fact that she did not have a Y-chromosome. So, to you I offer the following: a woman who is in disagreement with Hillary on nearly every single issue of our time. I trust the transition will be easy for you, because you women do not have the mental capacity to notice the difference"

Disgusting.

(for those of you who doubt that Palin was a carefully calculated pick to go after these mythical disgruntled PUMAs, go watch Palin's remarks in Dayton from today in which she compares herself to Clinton and the 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling)
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

The Blackberry gets Webbed

2008-08-01T17:38:00.001-07:00

Today, I purchased internet service for my blackberry pearl. So far, it's been an interesting ride getting it set up, downloading social networking apps (twitterberry, facebook, rambleIM, etc), google apps and sync services, games, and other such things. Now I'm testing out how to use blogger mobile, and then I think I'll be done! Oh, and I'd really like to get RTM for blackberry, but I need a pro account for that. I may have to do so.

As far as the rest of my life goes, it goes well. Work is fun and active, Piper is doing great, and everything seems in tip-top shape.

peace

-- David Kettler
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

The Kitchen Sync. Synx. Other witty title.

2008-07-30T19:15:00.000-07:00

Figure I may as well blog this thing I've been working on for the past month or so... The idea is as follows:

The Kitchen Synx is a four-part program suite focused on social media, traditional communication mediums, web browsing, life organization, social bookmarking, download services, rss aggregation, and document creation.

The first program in the suite is called "Chatter"
Chatter is a program which aggregates all messaging services into one, easy-to-use interface. Email, SMS, twitter, blogger/blogspot, aim, gtalk, skype, facebook, myspace, etc are ideal services to begin with focus on, expanding as much as possible with an open source and API. Messages will all come into the "inbox" irregardless of source (although source will be included in the metadata associated with the message, allowing for filtering and such), and outgoing messages will have a "select medium" list of checkboxes allowing whatever is typed to be sent to any number of compatible services.

The second program in the suite is called "Calendar"
Calendar is a calendar organization and sharing synchronization service, compatible with gCal, remember the milk, Outlook (both calendar and to-do list functionality), iCal, facebook events, and (as with Chatter) potentially more with its open source and API. As with Chatter, any data will allowed to be routed to any other service with a pop-up selection upon appointment or task creation.

The third program in the suite is called "Collection"
Collection is a combination browser-media player-rss aggregator-social bookmark organizer-downloading organizer. It is the most complex of the programs in the suite, and may have to have some functionality removed for sake of sanity and RAM usage among other factors. Ideally, it would be akin to a Songbird with torrent, rss, and social bookmarking capabilities.

The fourth program in the suite is called "Creation"
Creation is a media creation program, focused on business documents such as word files, power point, photo organization and manipulation, note taking, brainstorm-charting, etc.

Anyway, its a massive undertaking which I'd clearly need a lot of help with. I hope to be able to look into how to move forward with the project once I get back to Stanford, and until then I guess I was just looking for suggestions, comments, etc.

"The Liberal Media"

2008-07-27T11:52:00.000-07:00

Yea, there's a liberal media bias, alright

the liberal media which covers Michelle Obama's "elitism" but dares not touch Cindy McCain's billion dollar inheritance, 7+ private homes, loan scandals, and private jets (not to mention her theft of prescription medication to feed a drug habit).

Speaking of the new Mrs. McCain, how come nobody in the liberal media covers McCain cheating on his first wife (once she was crippled in a car accident) with Cindy while still married (he was even still married to his first wife when he married Cindy), and then finally divorcing her?

the liberal media which refuses to cover the remnants of the Keating Five scandal, including his falsified IRS tax returns, and mafia connections

the liberal media which doesn't point out the ridiculously large number of supposed "misstatements" about McCain's supposed area of expertise, including
- claiming the existance of an Iraq-Pakistan Border
- repeated confusion of Sunnis and Shiites
- complete absence of knowledge on the timing of the Anbar Awakening relative to the troop surge
- claims as to the "saftey" of Iraq, even as he is covered by armored vehicles and air cover while strolling through a "peaceful market"
- his claim that the Iranians are training Al-Qaeda (despite the fact that Iran and Al-Q are warring religious factions) in Iraq
- his numerous votes against troop funding, including the new GI bill, troop health insurance, helmets and bullet-proof vests for soldiers on the ground, and many more, giving him one of the lowest ratings in the senate by multiple military organizations (all while hammering Obama for his ONE, SYMBOLIC vote against troop funding)

the liberal media which doesn't examine his economics record, including
- his repeated prior claims to have no economic knowledge
- his flip-flops on the bush tax cuts
- his repeated claims that tax cuts raise tax revenue (which has been a false Republican talking point for years)
- his statements regarding placing Phil Gramm as chairman of the Federal Reserve, the same Phil Gramm who headed the removal of Banking laws which were made to prevent catastrophes like the subprime mortgage scandal
- his insistance, along with Bush and one of his campaign advisors, that the current recession is all "psychological" caused by a "nation of whiners"

not to mention the liberal media which goes on and on about Obama's few policy retoolings (most of which are only miniscule shifts) while refusing to notice the innumerable mccain flip flops on
- Roe v Wade
- torture (including waterboarding)
- what religion he is (recently claimed to be baptist despite being episcopal his entire life (including a week prior to this claim), and never having been baptised Baptist)
- what he thinks of the christian right
- privatization of social security
- intelligent design
- offshore drilling
- iraqi requests for leaving iraq
- public financing (while McCain himself is technically following public financing law (although he didnt in the primaries), all of his fundraising is directed towards the RNC, which does not follow the very law he's blasting Obama for not following)
- talking with Hamas

calling social security "disgraceful" (even as he gets one of the largest possible benefit checks from it each month), admitting to the use of prostitutes, voting against funding Katrina aid, finishing 894 out of 899 in Annapolis, talks of how "I hated the gooks. I will hate them as long as I live.", and many more embarrassing escapades.

oh, good thing the liberal media covers all of this stuff.

Utterly Ridiculous (some polticking)

2008-07-08T23:01:00.001-07:00

"A middle-class family making $66,000 a year would see their taxes drop by $319 a year under McCain's proposal, while a wealthy family making $604,000 a year would see a cut of $45,000. By contrast, Obama offers the biggest breaks for taxpayers at the bottom and in the middle of the income spectrum, while imposing sizeable tax increases on some of the highest earners -- those making more than $250,000 annually. Under Obama's plan, the middle-income family would receive a tax break that is three times larger than McCain's -- $1,042. The wealthy family would see a tax increase of $116,000 a year."

--Salon, on the new McCain tax proposals

Creativity--A Reprise

2008-07-07T14:56:00.001-07:00

"It's our job to not let history repeat.

A call to the youth! Your freedom ain't so free, it's just loose, but the power of your voice could redirect every truth. Shift and shape the world you want and keep your fears in a noose--let them dangle from a banner star spangled. I'm willing and able to lift my dreams up out of their cradle. Nurse and nurture my ideals 'til they're much more than a fable. I can be all I can be and do much more than I'm paid to, and I won't be a slave to what authorities say do. My desire is to live within a nation on fire, where creative passions burn and raise the stakes ever higher. Where no person is addicted to some twisted supplier who promotes the sort of freedom sold to the highest buyer. We demand a truth naturally at one with the land, not a plant that photosynthesizes bombs on demand, or a search for any weapons we let fall from our hands.

I got beats and a plan.

I'm gonna do what I can."

--Saul Williams

Creativity--A Memoir

2008-07-04T21:40:00.000-07:00

Oh, creation. It's been too long. Too long.

I continually jokingly tell my girlfriend that I cannot write because I need stress in my life to create. She laughs half-heartedly. She can sense the truth. She knows that all good songs are of a love unrequited, and my love is requited in full.

I read Saul Williams. I let the wordplay satiate my desire for cleverness, for emotional provocation, for inspiration. I listen to Oceansize. I let the maze of intricate rhythms and chordal structures weave through my consciousness.

I write nothing. I play nothing.

I begin to believe that I've reached the point of over-stimulation in the arts. Of over-study. Everything I make fails to move me the way the masters move me. Everything I make reminds me of some other work, be it theirs or my own. I see connections everywhere, and decry my own individuality.

Hell, maybe I'm even writing this blog now to attempt to reawaken the spirit. Let out what lies within with the hope that someone out there will read it, find something in it, respond to it in some fashion, even if I never witness said response.

I've become a homebody. I care for my family, my girlfriend, my friends. My job, the news, other blogs and RSS-worthy media. I venture out beyond my comfort zone little.

I don't know what can shake me from this apathy. I simply do not know.

I hope that I am simply in a state of transition now--getting used to my new ways of thinking and seeing the world, new ways of interacting with those around me. Getting used to the comfort, really. My comfort zone is too large.

I recognize that creativity is supposed to take some work--I'm just not used to having to put that work in. It used to come naturally, fluidly. I would overlook the laments from other artists complaining of writers block and a loss of passion. I was above that.

Simply put, I need to be moved again. Moved to action. Moved to belief that I have an ability, a vision, and a duty to put that vision out there. A noblesse oblige of the arts. An arrogance and swagger.

Tonight, I write this blog. Tomorrow, I record an old song. Over the next week, I write a new song.

I know that forcing creativity creates shoddy work, but I see now that shoddy work is better than no work, and it will get me back on track.

Wish me luck.

"I'm Just the Excuse"

2008-06-30T12:49:00.001-07:00

“I love when I’m shaking hands on a rope line and”— he mimes the motion, hand over hand — “I see little old white ladies and big burly black guys and Latino girls and all their hands are entwining. They’re feeding on each other as much as on me."

He shrugs; it’s that distancing eye of the author.

“It’s like I’m just the excuse.”

--NYT, June 4, 2008

Summer Begins

2008-06-18T21:05:00.001-07:00

Alright, well time for my first update since getting back from Stanford:

Delaware's great--much greener and generally more beautiful than I remember it. Driving around, especially in the valley, has been extremely relaxing.

As far as the people go, friends seem to be fine, and family is pretty much the same as always. I've hung out with Mike and Charlie the most, and have been trying to get in touch with more Tower Hill people except most have already started work. As for me, I don't start work until July 1.

That said, I went in for a work meeting today (I work in the University Relations department of Wilmington University, for those of you who don't know), and got the skinny on plans for the summer. Audio-intensive work for TV spots has largely been cut in favor of minor video tweaks (commercials have already been shot), radio spots, etc. In other words, I get to try my hand at a wider array of skills this summer, which is precisely what I was looking for.

Anyway, as I said, I don't start 'til July 1 as I'll be at Myrtle Beach with Mike circa June 23rd. That is sure to be a lot of fun. Maybe I can finally work on my tan (Stanford was a little too work intensive to really take advantage of the Cali sun).

So... yea. I guess that's about it. Piper's in Jamaica until Sunday, so we only get to talk via one email a day and about 10 minutes of IM conversation (internet use is a cent a second down there!)

Finals

2008-06-09T00:56:00.000-07:00

Do I really want to be that blogger who incessantly updates with personal minutia which no sane soul would even come close to giving half of a rat's ass about? No. But that said, I'm procrastinating, and blogging seems to be a great way to do that.

So, yea. I'm cramming for finals. BioSci 150, aka Human Behavioral Biology. It would help if I knew biology, of course, but whatever... I'll soldier through it. Really interesting stuff, until Sapolsk just throws a bunch of specifics at me, then I just get lost. We'll see how it goes. Blasting post-rock, as always, seems to help. Motherfucker=Redeemer (Part One) is a great, great song. Too bad GY!BE isn't around anymore.

Anyway... back to Microsoft Word and another 5 or so 50-page documents. Hopefully I can finish up before 4 AM? (reminds me of that one TED video by Rives... go check it out)

Greetings

2008-06-07T14:44:00.000-07:00

alright, here it is everyone... I've finally given in. To the blog thing. Bold, right? I know. I'll likely update extremely rarely (as I've yet to think of any use for this thing), but now it's been made, and is an option.

hey, if you got here somehow (how the fuck did you get here, anyway?), maybe you can tell me what to do with this thing? word. perchance this could be a thing...

peace.,