All posts by anomalogue

Why our ideas diverge

Hermeneutics, Metaphysics, Pragmatism

What are the personal differences that produce pluralism? Here’s a list off the top of my head:

  1. What is our stock of life experiences, which serve as points of reference and call for explanation?
  2. What is our schema of relevance (which determines what draws our attention and what remains unperceived)?
  3. What is our conceptual repertoire (which limits the questions we know how to ask, the answers we can conceive, and which ideas are inconceivable)?
  4. What are our prior conceptual commitments (which limit the range of philosophically acceptable answers to the questions we ask)?
  5. What questions do we habitually ask?
  6. When faced with competing criteria of theory choice, which are given relative precedence?
  7. What is our perplexity tolerance (which limits our appetite for novel questions and philosophically unacceptable answers)?
  8. How do we approach the unanswerable questions of metaphysics?

 

The questions of suffering

Ethics, Philosophy

Suffering, more than anything else, demands answers.

But what kind of question does suffering want us to ask? And what is the answer meant to do?

You’ll get very different kind of answers, practical responses and even dispositions toward life itself depending on your angle of approach to the question of suffering. It might even be useful to construct a personality typology on the basis of the person’s (or group’s) habitual question to suffering.

Let’s use a list of interrogative pronouns as a compass for taxonomizing angles of approach to our question.

  • What? The question of Object/Idea/Action
  • When? The question of Time
  • Where? The question of Place
  • How? The question of Manner
  • Why? The question of Reason
  • Whose? The question of Possession
  • Which? The question of Specific subject
  • Whither? The question of Goal
  • Whence? The question of Source

I definitely have some strong preferences on which angles of inquiry produce superior questions, answers, responses and life dispositions. For instance asking “who caused my suffering?” tends to lead into resentment and desire for retribution; where “why is there suffering?” or “how should I suffer?” or “how should I approach suffering” leads (or can lead) discover meaning in suffering; and “what causes suffering” leads toward discovering practical strategies for reducing suffering.

To choose, we must see the choices in the first place, and this means noticing which questions we habitually ask, which questions we to neglect, and most importantly of all, which questions we have never conceived, the questions and possibilities to which we are blind.

This freedom of inquiry might be our very best freedom. All too often we start the answer we want to believe and then ask  ourselves and others leading questions that induce that answer. This strategy produces tension between belief and truth, then fear of truth and finally hostility toward reality.

We do not get to choose what we believe. Nor do we get to choose what we disbelieve or doubt, as C. S. Peirce famously observed.

But we can ask whatever questions we are able to conceive. This is not to say that we can ask any question we want as a live question. The experience of asking is part of the answer we receive. If we ask a question and feel no urgency in the asking and no longing to hear the answer, that is itself a kind of answer.

To use an optical analogy (a disgraced but still useful class of analogies): We can choose to look wherever we wish, but we cannot choose what we see. But if we do not see anything we want to see where we look, we can choose to keep looking, and this is the freedom that goes by the name philosophy. This suggests a further question: when can we stop looking? That is a complex moral problem too tangled to go into right now.

Tacit commonality

Biography

It can be deeply enjoyable to argue with people who share a common philosophical perspective, because these differences of opinion emphasize a commonality of understanding. This is as true of an argument about sports as it is an argument about what an argument is.

I believe the pleasure in this activity is similar to enjoyment of art and of religion at its best: something shared that is undeniably real but which defies speech becomes palpably present. This presence connects us.

No matter how rarefied our stratum of thought, discussing matters of truth within this stratum happens within yet another stratum of commonality, and it allows us to feel its reality and our connection within it.

Even if we try to transcend our understanding, to suffer and grope for a passage beyond our knowing, we do so within something, and we do so with others who feel the presence of tacit commonality — a commonality of restless souls who keep feeling their way further and further, in thinner and thinner air, with fewer friends.

*

What we love for no reason we can explain, we love for lack of words.

Je ne sais quoi.

 

Slurpy, mergy, touchy-feely notions of interpersonal being

Anthropology, Biography, Design, Design Instrumentalism, Ethics, Hermeneutics, History, Philosophy, Politics

Wow, this post really sprawled out. It hits a lot of my enduring interests. I’m not sure it is suitable for reading. It might just be a personal journal entry written to myself. Feel free to eavesdrop if you wish, but I cannot promise it will make sense or yield any value.

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I listened to a fascinating Radio Open Source podcast on Hannah Arendt’s conception of evil, which ended with a wonderful discussion on empathy.

Jerome Kohn: Empathy is a fancy word or fancy theory that she argued passionately against. First of all she thought it was an impossible notion in the sense that it really means feeling what someone else feels. Sympathy, fellow feeling, is another thing. But empathy is the claim that you can actually feel what someone else is feeling. And for that Arendt found no evidence whatsoever. One could say it’s even the opposite of her notion of thinking from another person’s point of view. What you have to be able to do is to see a given issue from different points of view, to make it real. And then through those different points of view, with your own eyes, you don’t feel what the other person is feeling, you see what he is seeing through your own eyes, and then you can make a judgement. The more people you can take into consideration in this enlarged mentality, that actually is the foundation of reality for Arendt, the more valid your judgement will be.

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl: Jerry’s exactly right. Hannah Arendt was always opposed to these slurpy, mergy, touchy-feely notions about what binds people to each other. And she felt very keenly that what really binds one person to another is a commitment to try to see the world from that person’s point of view with your own eyes. Not to subscribe to their point of view or to merge with their point of view, but to be able to walk around and see what the world looks like from where they’re standing. But looking at it with your own eyes, so that you can then, as it were, discuss it with them. Not merge with them in some way, but discuss it with them. She was all about discussion. Not empathy in that sentimental way.

Christopher Lydon (host): And yet, well, there are distinctions without huge differences in some way. To put oneself in another’s mind is the beginning of something important.

EYB: To think that you can put yourself in another’s mind in the beginning of a terrible arrogance which has tremendous consequences. It’s a difference with great consequences. People who think they that they can know what another person thinks or feel what another person feels are narcissistic.

CL: Well, ok, I don’t want to make a philosophical or an endless argument about it. Isn’t it the incapacity and the lack of interest in that perspective precisely what she found at the core of Eichmann’s banality and Eichmann’s evil, really?

JK: Well, no, it was his thoughtlessness, his inability to think from any other point of view but his own.

EYB: Exactly. And these are very important distinctions.

This exchange is especially interesting to me for three reasons.

First: as a Human Centered Design researcher/strategist/designer, I am constantly telling people that I am in the “empathy business.” However, I have long been uncomfortable with the characterization of what I do as “empathy”. To characterize understanding another person subjectively as primarily a matter of experiencing how they feel misses the mark in a very modernistic way. (em- ‘in’ + pathos ‘feeling’). While feelings are important to what I do, they are not the primary focus. I would prefer to characterize my work as concrete hermeneutics, but words like that do not fly in the flatlands of business where thinking lags a minimum of three philosophical generations. So, I’ve adopted “empathy” and accepted the inevitable misconceptions that go with it, because that’s what it takes to be understood even appoximately by most people.

It is hardly surprising that I see things similarly to to Young-Bruehl and Kohn, because I belong to their tradition. Heidegger taught Arendt and Gadamer who both taught my favorite thinker Richard J. Bernstein. A Clifford Geertz quote from Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism has stayed with me as an anchor for my understanding of what a good human centered designer does.

Second, I think that when we see things this way, we tend to treat emotionally-oriented people who are very sensitive and sentimentally responsive to people around them as having some kind of monopoly on human understanding. In my experience, there are multiple stages of coming to understanding of another person, and a talent for sensing and responding does not always correspond with a talent for intuiting other people’s worldviews, nor an ability to think, speak and create from or into another worldview. It takes a fairly vast range of talents to act pluralistically with any degree of effectiveness.

I think a lot of the political problems we are experiencing today result from shoddy and retrogressive philosophical conceptions of alterity (“otherness”), which still see understanding of other people as very literally empathic, as a matter of emotions. According to this view, to know what is going on with another person, we must ourselves have had the experiences and emotions that other person has had. In an effort to understand and to demonstrate our understanding we must induce emotions similar to theirs. Two consequences follow: 1) The one who understands must try to produce the right emotions, and this production of emotion is the demonstration of understanding, which leads to some fairly repulsive public displays of political sentimentality. 2) The one who is understood is put in a position of judging the authenticity of those emotional displays, which is more or less being given the role of arbitrary judge. And if the feelings of the understood is viewed as the central datum or a special kind of insight (being “woke”) into a political situation (typically gauging the degree of prejudicial unfairness, its impact on those victimized by that prejudice and what is required to rectify that unfairness) this amounts to extreme epistemological privilege. Only the victim of prejudice has access to the reality of the situation, and those who are not the victims are incapable of perceiving how they participate in the perpetration, so to use the charming the formulation of today’s hyper-just youngsters, it is their job to STFU and to accept the truth dictated to them. It never occurs to anyone within the power hierarchy of wokeness that there’s anything superior to all this illiberal mess to awaken to. There are philosophical worldviews that are more thorough, more comprehensive and more expansive than the dwarfish ideology of the popular left, but for all the reasons they are eager to point out to anyone who defies them, they are entirely incapable of seeing beyond the motivated reasoning of their own class interests. (This does not mean I think the popular right is any better. It is not. We are in a Weimaresque situation of resentful evil left idiocy vs paranoid evil right idiocy, with the reasonable voices shoved to the margins.)

Third, I’ve found myself misunderstood by many close friends on how I view relationships, and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl did a great job of capturing how people think I see them: a “slurpy, mergy, touchy-feely notion about what binds people to each other.” I think the misunderstanding is rooted in this same conception of human understanding being primarily an emotional phenomenon. When my own ideal of marriage or of friendship is strained through the filter of today’s left worldview, it looks like a mystical merging of souls that arouses (and should arouse!) suspicions of domination and anxieties around loss of self. But any attempt I make to try to explain the difference between what I have in mind looks like, well, an attempt at philosophical domination and a threat to the selfhood of whoever is foolish enough to take it seriously. Who am I to tell someone something they don’t already know? And anyway, it smells very cultish to listen to someone claiming to know better than the public what is true and right. So, by the circular logic of the popular worldview of the left, it is superior to form one’s own individual opinion (never mind that this opinion on opinions is a product of an unexamined and manifestly broken worldview.)

Obviously, this means extreme alienation for anyone who adopts a sharply differing worldview that affirms the importance of collaboratively developing shared understandings with those around them. In an environment of extreme ideological conformity (with brutal social consequences for infractions) that exalts above all the importance of intellectual independence — but strictly within its own confined philosophical horizon — a philosophy of interdependence, of collaborative development of the very concepts one uses to form one’s opinions, and exalting a togetherness in shared worldview is marked for expulsion.

Anyway, what I really have in mind when I imagine ideal personal connections is, once again, that ideal sketched out by Bernstein, captured so well by Geertz, which I will now go ahead and re-re-quote.

…Accounts of other peoples’ subjectivities can be built up without recourse to pretensions to more-than-normal capacities for ego effacement and fellow feeling. Normal capacities in these respects are, of course, essential, as is their cultivation, if we expect people to tolerate our intrusions into their lives at all and accept us as persons worth talking to. I am certainly not arguing for insensitivity here, and hope I have not demonstrated it. But whatever accurate or half-accurate sense one gets of what one’s informants are, as the phrase goes, really like does not come from the experience of that acceptance as such, which is part of one’s own biography, not of theirs. It comes from the ability to construe their modes of expression, what I would call their symbol systems, which such an acceptance allows one to work toward developing. Understanding the form and pressure of, to use the dangerous word one more time, natives’ inner lives is more like grasping a proverb, catching an allusion, seeing a joke — or, as I have suggested, reading a poem — than it is like achieving communion.

And now I will quote myself:

“Understanding the form and pressure of, to use the dangerous word one more time, natives’ inner lives is more like grasping a proverb, catching an allusion, seeing a joke — or, as I have suggested, reading a poem…” or knowing how to design for them.

A design that makes sense, which is easy to interact with and which is a valuable and welcome addition to a person’s life is proof that this person is understood, that the designer cared enough to develop an understanding and to apply that understanding to that person’s benefit.

A good design shares the essential qualities of a good gift.

The kind of merging I have in mind is just sharing a worldview and using it together to live together, what Husserl (Heidegger’s teacher) called a “lifeworld“. I’ve called the process “enworldment”.

The merging aspect of this ideal enters the stage through my belief (shared, I believe by Process Theology) that souls are universe-sized. The pragmatic consequence of what one means when one says “everything” is the scope and density of one’s soul. To enworld* with another is to bring two “everythings” into harmonious relationship, and to begin to function more like a culture than two isolated individuals within this isolating milieu so many of us, without ever choosing, without even knowing we had a choice, inhabit as prisoners of our own destitute freedom.

(Note: that “enworld” link above is a pretty old post, and I’m not sure right now how much of it I still agree with. It makes me want to engage my old self in dialogue and try to discover how much common ground we have. How enworlded am I with my 9-years-ago self?)

Engineering mindset, design mindset

Philosophy

Some people think design is a subset of engineering. According to this mindset, the goal is to make a thing of some kind. Engineering figures out how to make the thing, and design figures out how to make that thing more appealing to people.

Others think engineering is a subset of design. According to this mindset, the goal is to improve peoples lives. Design figures out what people are doing, what they need and what is required to make their lives better, and engineering figures out how to make those things happen.

Engineering creates systems. People from outside the system use the engineered system.

Design creates systems made up of people and things. The people who use the system are a part of the designed system.

What is it like to be a rock?

Philosophy

Somewhere in Will To Power or in one of Nietzsche’s published notebooks, there is a question posed: “Why should we suppose there is not something like desire experienced by a rock thrown in the air as it curves back to return to the ground?”

I read this passage a little more than ten years ago, and it impressed me and took root in me, and I think this might be the point when my own trajectory began  turned toward process philosophy. It is interesting to me that the earliest process theologians were Unitarian-Universalist. That is the ground from which I was thrown. 

Tragedy-fortified process theology

Judaism, Metaphysics

I think my view of life is more tragic than the process philosophies I’ve encountered so far. I’ve found myself writing “lacks tragedy” in the margins of passages such as this one, from Mesle’s Process-Relational Philosophy:

It is vital to emphasize again and again that God’s power is not omnipotent unilateral or coercive power. Quite the opposite. God cannot coerce any creature. Every creature has its own freedom. Rather God is the persuasive ground of freedom. So God knows what we may choose and are likely to choose, but not what we will choose. God is omniscient (all knowing) in the sense that God knows everything there is to know, but since the future does not exist it is not there to be known. Only the possibilities for the future can be known perfectly. Nor can God remain unaffected by the world: God is the only one who has the strength, the ability, to be open to every single experience in the world. God is the only one who can take every thing in, integrate it with God’s own infinitely ancient wisdom, and create God’s self out of that relationship in each moment. God is the only one who can then feed back to every creature in the world a lure and call toward those possibilities that are best for it. All the possibilities are there, good and bad, but they come to us, Whitehead says, with God’s call toward the better.

I see no reason why God should always offer a win-win for both the participant and the whole in which it participates. In fact, I think the role of religion is to help us affirm the whole even when it requires us to make sacrifices or even be sacrificed. Attempts at claiming that there’s a possibility of individual benefit built into every crisis lacks credibility and sublimity.

I do believe in “the lure”, and in fact it is the basis for my own belief in God, but I believe this lure demands transcending love from us, and is not itself an act of love of our individual selves. The lure demands that we live from ourselves toward that which includes and exceeds us. 

The miraculous emergence of unfreedom

Metaphysics, Philosophy

Reading Mesle’s Process-Relational Philosophy, I just had an epiphany: for the last few centuries we have been asking the question of free-will from a base-norm of unfreedom: “how does freedom emerge from the dynamics of unfree materials?” If you adopt Process Philosophy’s metaphysic, it makes much more sense to ask “how does unfreedom emerge from the interactions of free-willed particles?” This is a fascinating way to reinterpret reality.

Witness Bike

Biography

Some pictures of a prototype of the bike my brother and I are producing together. I got to ride it over the weekend, and it is perfect. It is stable but very lively. There was no need to get used to it; I was at home on it instantly. And I can’t stop looking at it. It is a beautiful object (which was one of our requirements).

 

The frame is lugged. Look how pretty the lugs are. The color came out exactly as I hoped, a very reddish purple.

Myth of the Rise

Judaism

If you believe Earth was created as a paradise meant to remain perfect, but made imperfect by human wickedness, every flaw will be viewed as an example of corruption that should never have happened.

If you believe Earth was created brutal but has over time raised itself out of brutality in a semi-steady process of development toward something better, every flaw can be viewed as a project for improvement.

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Some people look at the United States of America as a place where the Civil Rights Movement was able to happen, and this is one more reason to honor and love it.

Some people look at the United States of America as a place where the Civil Rights Movement was needed to rectify inexcusable injustices, and this is one more reason to despise and condemn it.

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I have always instinctively disliked the myth of the Fall.

Last week’s pasha was Bereshit. (Happy Simchat Torah.) The rabbi who facilitated Torah Study commented that Judaism has never read the story of the Edenic exile as a catastrophe or a matter of regret. For Judaism, the book of Genesis is stage setting for the main act, Exodus: a story of liberation from bondage, a cause for perpetual celebration.

Two points of departure: an Exile and an Exodus. Two trajectories: a Fall and a Rise.

Bernard Loomer

Ethics, Philosophy, Politics

From Bernard Loomer’s “Two Conceptions of Power”:

The world of the individual who can be influenced by another without losing his or her identity or freedom is larger than the world of the individual who fears being influenced. The former can include ranges and depths of complexity and contrast to a degree that is not possible for the latter. The stature of the individual who can let another exist in his or her own creative freedom is larger than the size of the individual who insists that others must conform to his own purposes and understandings.

…

Under the relational conception of power what is truly for the good of any one or all of the relational partners is not a preconceived good. The true good is not a function of controlling or dominating influence. The true good is an emergent from deeply mutual relationships.

Perfect. I’m going to read as much Loomer as I can.

This concept of linear/unilateral power and relational power is going to be valuable.

Ancestors and siblings of process thought

ANT, Design, Design Instrumentalism, Extended Self, Fables, myths & parables, Hermeneutics, Holarchy, Judaism, Symbols and diagrams

While I’m scanning passages from C. Robert Mesle’s Process-Relational Philosophy, here are two more that inspired me.

The first passage appeals to my designer consciousness:

Descartes was wrong in his basic dualism. The world is not composed of substances or of two kinds of substances. There is, however, what David Ray Griffin calls an “organizational duality.” Descartes was correct that rocks and chairs and other large physical objects do not have minds, while humans do. In Whiteheadian terms, rocks are simply not organized to produce any level of experience above that of the molecules that form them. In living organisms, however, there can be varying degrees to which the organism is structured to give rise to a single series of feelings that can function to direct the organism as a whole. We can see fairly clearly that at least higher animals like chimps and dogs have a psyche (mind or soul) chat is in many ways like our own. This psyche draws experience from the whole body (with varying degrees of directness and clarity), often crossing a threshold into some degree of consciousness, and is able in turn to use that awareness to direct the organism toward actions that help it to survive and achieve some enjoyment of life. The self, or soul, then is not something separate from the body. It arises out of the life of the body, especially the brain.

The mind/soul/psyche is the flow of the body’s experience. Yet your body produces a unique mind that is also able to have experiences reaching beyond those derived directly from the body. We can think about philosophy, love, mathematics, or death in abstract conceptual ways that are not merely physical perceptions. Without the body, there would be no such flow of experience, but with a properly organized body, there can be a flow of experience that moves beyond purely bodily sensation. Furthermore, your mind can clearly interact with your body so that you can move, play, eat, hug, and work. There is a kind of dualism here in that the mind is not only the body but it is, in Griffin’s phrase, a hierarchical dualism rather than a metaphysical one. There are not two kinds of substances — minds and bodies. There is one kind of reality — experience. But experience has both its physical and mental aspects.

To my ears, this is a beautiful dovetail joint waiting to be fitted to extended cognition. “Rocks are simply not organized to produce any level of experience above that of the molecules that form them” but if a human organizes those rocks in particular ways, for instance drilling and shaping them into abacus beads, or melting them down to manufacture silicon chips, those rocks can be channeled into extended cognitive systems which in a very real way become extensions of our individual and collective minds. It is ironic to me that even at this exact instance, in typing out this sentence, a thought is forming before my eyes with the help of rocks reorganized as silicon chips which are participating in the “having” of this very thought. And if anyone is reading this and understanding it, my thought, multi-encoded, transmitted, decoded and interpreted by your own intelligence — rocks have helped organize this event of understanding! Humans help organize more and more of the “inanimate” world into participants of experience.

And now we are wading out into the territory developed by Actor-Network Theory, which asks, expecting intricately branching detailed answers: How do humans and non-humans assemble themselves into societies? I think the commonality within these harmoniously similar thought programs is their common rootedness in Pragmatism. It is no accident that Richard J. Bernstein saw pragmatism as a constructive way out of  the unbridled skeptical deconstruction of post-modernism, and that Whitehead, who acknowledged a debt to Pragmatism, is said to offer a constructive postmodernism.

The second passage appeals to my newly Jewish hermeneutic consciousness. This is a quote by Whitehead:

The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation.

This, of course, is a description of the hermeneutic circle, the concept that we understand parts in terms of the concepts by which we understand them, but that our concepts are often modified (or replaced) in the effort to subsume recalcitrant parts. We tack between focusing on the details and (to the degree we are reflective) revisiting how we are conceptualizing those details. These are the two altitudes Whitehead mentions: an on-the-ground investigation of detail and a sky-view survey of how all those details fit together.

This is an ancient analogy. The Egyptians made the ibis, an animal with a head like a snake (the lowest animal) and the body of a bird (the highest animal) the animal of Thoth, their god of writing, the Egyptian analogue to Hermes. Nietzsche also used this image in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and that is where I first encountered it.

An eagle soared through the sky in wide circles, and on him there hung a serpent, not like prey but like a friend: for she kept herself wound around his neck. “These are my animals,” said Zarathustra and was happy in his heart. “The proudest animal under the sun and the wisest animal under the sun — they have gone out on a search. They want to determine whether Zarathustra is still alive. Verily, do I still live? I found life more dangerous among men than among animals; on dangerous paths walks Zarathustra. May my animals lead me!” When Zarathustra had said this he recalled the words of the saint in the forest, sighed, and spoke thus to his heart: “That I might be wiser! That I might be wise through and through like my serpent! But there I ask the impossible: so I ask my pride that it always go along with my wisdom. And when my wisdom leaves me one day — alas, it loves to fly away — let my pride then fly with my folly.”

And I have seen the Star of David as an image of the synthesis of atomistic ground-up and holistic sky-down understandings. And this is one reason I chose Nachshon (“snakebird”) as my Hebrew name when I converted to Judaism.

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(Eventually, I’ll have to try to connect process thought with my extremely simplistic and possibly distorted understanding of chaos theory. Eventually.)

We make ourselves out of each other

Philosophy

From C. Robert Mesle’s Process-Relational Philosophy:

Occasionally I have the pleasure of performing a wedding ceremony. As a process-relational thinker, I have something I want to say about human relationships in general, and marriage in particular. As John B. Cobb Jr. wisely observed, a soul is not a thing. It is not an isolated stone hidden somewhere inside us untouched by our life’s experience, enduring unchanged by the changes of our lives. A soul is a dynamic process, a bundle of experiences, thoughts, emotions, dreams, and memories. In each moment of our life, we take in all of our past experience and all of our new experiences, and we create our selves out of them, deciding who we will be in that moment.

Two people who join in marriage will be creating themselves out of each other and out of their relationship. Each word, each glance, each touch, each kiss, each shared moment, each thought about each other — everything they do will become part of the material out of which they will create themselves. They will gradually discover that they have literally become parts of each other, parts of each others’ souls. They should have a special care, then, how they treat each other, have a care what material they each give to the other for the creation of their souls.

Obviously, a relational vision of the human soul confirms and helps to clarify our special obligations to children. A child’s soul is not a supernatural Cartesian substance “which so exists that it needs no other thing in order to exist.” I’m sure Descartes never meant to suggest this, but if he were right about mental substances, it would seem to follow that it would not matter what experiences a child had. Whippings, cigarette burns, dark closets, verbal humiliation like “you’re garbage and you always will be garbage” would just be so many accidental qualities that would come and go without changing that unchanging substance. But we know better. Process-relational thought offers us a vision of reality that helps us to understand what we all deeply know to be true. Sadly, as well as happily, we know that children must create themselves out of their relationships. They create themselves out of the genes and the nutrition and love, neglect, or cruelty they receive. They must create their souls out of the relationships they find themselves in. While there is some degree of self-creative freedom that often allows children to amaze us with their resilience, every person who has ever talked to me about the impact of abuse on them speaks of the deep scars they carry and will always carry. Children create their souls out of their relationships with us. Have a care: It matters what we give them to work with.

Exactly.

The pain of non-response

Ethics

When I attempt to communicate with people and get no response, I find it intensely painful.

Maybe I’ve just gotten sensitive about it and notice it more, but until a few years ago I do not recall speaking to people and being ignored, as if I hadn’t spoken. Now it happens frequently. By my understanding of manners this is appallingly rude, not only according to rules of etiquette but by universal human standards.

I have also noticed an increase in leaving electronic communications unacknowledged and unanswered. I don’t mean ignoring group emails or forwards or links. I mean ignoring personal messages.

I have been told many times by multiple people that this should not be taken personally and that in today’s world this is not an offensive behavior. Cultural norms change and hand-wringing only makes you bitter and keeps you stuck in the past. While I understand this argument, I find it unpersuasive and even depressing. Common behaviors that begin to feel familiar, then acceptable, then normal, then expected do not automatically become good. The belief that what has become common also becomes good encourages us to abdicate our moral judgment. And really, aren’t we selective in our passivity? There is judgment smuggled in when we accept former rudenesses as benign or as progress. We don’t accept all change this way.

I feel an urgent need to explain this pain, not only because pain by its nature seems to demand investigation into its causes, but, it appears to me that I find non-response more painful than most other people do, and I probably need to be able to explain why this is the case to others as well as myself. And maybe my explanation will inspire others to change their behaviors and their expectations of how others behave toward them.

This is my attempt at an explanation:

I think the pain of on-response is rooted in its deep moral ambiguity: it can mean many things, across a broad range of significance.

It can be purely accidental and insignificant. The attempt to communicate was not perceived. Or it can be a mostly innocent postponement or forgetting to respond, due to other more pressing things are going on. It can be an incapacity to respond, for reasons having nothing to do with the communication.

But crossing into the personal side of the spectrum of meanings, it can mean that the communication just isn’t seen as important enough to warrant a response. Or it can be an inability or unwillingness to respond for personal reasons, for instance feelings about the anticipated exchange. Or the silence might signal anger.

Or, worse, the non-response could be a sign of contempt. The contempt might be minor, for instance, a disregard for subjects or themes deemed unimportant. Or the contempt might be more serious: the speaker deserves no response. Or the contempt might be profoundly personal: the speaker is not worth the effort of a response.

The more the non-response is a pattern, the more likely the meaning of the silence falls somewhere on the contempt end of the spectrum. This is why non-response is offensive.

One of the key functions of manners is to keep alienating questions of these kinds from arising. Manners have us 1) signal our respect, and 2) offer explanations for behaviors that could be misinterpreted as disrespectful.

I do not believe the behavioral changes in response to the social media and rampant addiction to mobile devices are creating new norms of etiquette. I believe they are destroying manners and weakening human relationships. I believe general decay of manners (and in general of honoring social obligation) contributes to what some are calling a loneliness epidemic.

Respect is a fundamental human need, rooted in the affirmation that our existence is acknowledged and valued by the people around us. Social norms that allow us to disrespect others (even when that disrespect is not intended or felt as an emotion by the disrespectful) is creating a world that denies these fundamental human needs.

Gatecrasher maxim

Philosophy

When I have a  metanoetic transformation that throws me into a new world of insight, I’ve learned to tell myself: “I am late to this party.”

A person who undergoes metanoetic transformation is truly “born again” in the sense that it is necessary to learn how to speak and act all over again, to flourish in this freshly newly-revealed world. We can still speak about the more primitive facts of our lives, but the things that matter are imprisoned in privacy. It takes humble and painstaking work to re-mature  after conversion. Most of all, this means re-overcoming the egoism of infancy. Inexperienced converts think they’ve become godlike seers of the re-creation of all that is, when in fact, they’re just babies who don’t understand how populous the world already is.

Growing up again after being born again, re-socializing ourselves, learning new language for new experiences and learning to communicate and build on our new communities allows us to repeat the process. Eventually, we get better at maturing a little quicker. That starts with assuming that surely someone got here earlier and starting a search for the others who already know instead of assuming the apparent ignorance we see around is real.

There is always a party if you want to find it. And wanting to find that party is morality itself.

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(Yes, “gate” is a Janus reference.)

Rude tools

Design, Ethics, Extended Self, Philosophy

In my last post I promised that my next post would be “a theoretical tantrum on the ethics around that miserable love triangle between developer, tool and user.” and that I thought the issue of “‘ownership’ of software is an unrecognized moral crisis of our times.”

This is that post.

My belief in the importance of resolving the issue of tool ownership hinges on a theory which I experience as true: Extended Cognition. According to wikipedia “Extended cognition is the view that mental processes and mind extend beyond the body to include aspects of the environment in which an organism is embedded and the organism’s interaction with that environment. Cognition goes beyond the manipulation of symbols to include the emergence of order and structure evolving from active engagement with the world.” The example offered to me by my friend Zach, who introduced this concept to me, was of doing addition with your fingers. Viewed through the lens of Extended Cognition the movement of the hand is part of the thinking that produces the result.

Where I experience this as most true is when I use tools that I’ve learned to use skillfully. That is, I’ve mastered them so fully that they more or less disappear as I use them. If we know how to use a pen, we no more need to think about using that pen while we are using it than we need to think about our hand. It becomes part of us, and it allows us to focus our attention on the thing we are doing, and to become absorbed in our activity.

This is true also of software tools — or at least well-designed ones. If a tool is well-designed, I am able to just concentrate on the content of my activity, without the need to split my attention thinking about use of the tool. Often, I can’t even explain how I use a tool. My hands know what to do, and my verbal mind isn’t in the loop. What I know can only be demonstrated.

How many times have you told someone you can’t really explain how to do something on their computer of phone, but if you can just get your hands on the device you can show them? Sometimes it’s not enough to see the screen. Only actual doing of the interaction releases the know-how.

This kind of knowing that seems to exist just in the body is known as tacit knowledge. I like to call the part of UI design that harnesses this tacit knowledge “the tacit layer.” Back when designers still liked to talk about “intuitive design” this awareness was much more prevalent. But I think this way of thinking about design is in precipitous decline. Now, intuitive means little more than figure-it-outability.

Tools used largely in a tacit mode to develop ideas become an extensions of the user’s own being. To change a tool so that it stops functioning this way changes a person’s being. It literally prevents a person from thinking — it robs them of a piece of their own mind.

When we look at software in that light, doesn’t it seem like a norm that a company owns software, and that users pay a licensing fee for the right to use it offers far too little protection to the user? Shouldn’t users have more control over what is done to them?

I’m not suggesting a change in IP law or anything like that. I do think the software industry needs some different licensing arrangements, though. I’d like to see something like a user-developer covenant: “If you, the user, invite this tool into your life, adopt it and invest the effort to master it, you can trust us, the developer, to safeguard your investment by minimizing design changes that break the tacit layer, create distractions and force unwanted relearning. We understand that your concern is with what you are doing, not with the tool we offer you.”

 

 

Taking away my tools

Biography, Design

Over the last decade and a half I’ve relied on four tools for making my thoughts.

Of these four, two have broken in the last couple of years: Adobe Illustrator and WordPress. These two tools have undergone frequent deep UI changes, which have obsoleted my skills. When I try to use them now, I’m too busy thinking about how to use the UIs to concentrate on the ideas I’m attempting to develop.

Yesterday, I found out my hosting service is upgrading their server and it is going to bring down my Wiki, my core tool for organizing what I learn in my reading. I chose to host my own Wiki so I could control this key tool and not be subject to the whims of developers, but now they’ve caught up with me and ruined this tool, too. Now I only have one thinking tool left intact, and that is my own philosophy.

It’s funny; this feeling of vulnerability is exactly what led me to philosophy in the first place. When I was a kid living at home, my father was fond of informing me that I owned nothing — that he could take any of my possessions away any time he wanted to. My parents were always threatening my sister with taking away her horse if she didn’t toe the line. I saw clearly that I could not tolerate that kind of exposure. I figured the only thing I had that could not be taken away were my ideas, so that was what I made my treasure.

Stupidly, I have relied on tools under other people’s control to help me shape and craft my ideas, and when those people decide to exercise their whims to disrupt my ability to use these tools, my most precious capabilities — the things that help me be who I am — are jeopardized.

I’m halfway considering throwing out all my software tools and re-training myself to use just pen and paper to work through my ideas. While I’m at it maybe I’ll get rid of all my books and kick my awful caffeine habit. I can’t trust other people to even understand what I need, much less to actually respect the legitimacy of those needs, much less to act in a way that doesn’t harm me. And supporting those needs is entirely out of the question. What I need seems unreasonable to other people. Nevertheless, I need what I need, and that means I must reduce by dependency as well as my exposure. I think this is the root reason so many thinkers are ascetic.

My next post is going to be a theoretical tantrum on the ethics around that miserable love triangle between developer, tool and user. I am convinced that the “ownership” of software is an unrecognized moral crisis of our times.

Process Theology

Hermeneutics, Judaism, Pragmatism

I’ve been poking around in several books on Process Philosophy/Theology to see if my own homegrown theology isn’t in fact some version of Process Theology. So far I’m finding some closely matching concepts. (Two big ones: Panentheism and “the lure”.) That is not surprising: it turns out Whitehead was influenced by Pragmatism (which not long ago I considered my religion). Process Theology appears to me to be the religious implication of Pragmatism.

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For awhile I’ve speculated that Fundamentalism is actually a religion of its own: a distinctive way to interpret scripture and to practice religion. Fundamentalisms are more like one another than they are to other denominations within the same religion. I’ve come to see Mysticism and Humanism as similarly connected. (Note Oct. 3: and the book I’m reading reminded me, also Scholasticism.) There is considerable similarity across Mysticisms and Humanisms (that is, attempts to fit religion inside the Enlightenment framework).  I’ve been calling them “lateral traditions”. I’m sure this is not a new concept, and when I find the language others are using to talk about this idea I’ll adopt it.

I believe Process Theology represents another lateral tradition.