All posts by anomalogue

The biography of a head

Philosophy

I just underlined a passage from Rorty, and wrote in the margin “D 481 – biography of a head”:

The point of constructing a “truth theory of English” is not to enable philosophical problems to be put in a formal mode of speech, nor to explain the relationship between words and the world, but simply to lay out perspicuously the relation between parts of a social practice (the use of certain sentences) and other parts (the use of other sentences).

Rorty does explicitly say that the use of language is “a fairly small portion of reality” – but still, 262 pages and counting of linguistic tail-chasing that never leaves the study, that never links use of language with use of other non-linguistic tools (like saws, or cars, or petri dishes, or dollars, or particle accelerators), used alongside other people (non-professors, who make their livings not only with their brains and tongues, but with their hands, feet, backs and hearts) in order to deal with non-human entities (including, but not limited to computers — stuff like like rocks, germs, laws, clouds, plants, etc.) is exasperating me and making me long for philosophy abstracted from something other than academics’ own word-soaked lives.

In Daybreak (481), Nietzsche said of Kant and Schopenhauer,

“…their thoughts do not constitute a passionate history of a soul; there is nothing here that would make a novel, no crises, catastrophes or death-scenes; their thinking is not at the same time an involuntary biography of a soul but, in the case of Kant, the biography of a head, in the case of Schopenhauer the description and mirroring of a character (‘that which is unalterable’) and pleasure in the ‘mirror’ itself, that is to say in an excellent intellect… “

I’ve been trying to see the relevance of Anglo-American analytic philosophy, but so far it seems to be little more than the history of some heads.

I love philosophy, but only if that philosophy is a reflection on fully-lived life — not a reflection on a reflection on a reflection on an abstraction.

 

 

Potpourobori

Philosophy

There is no slope slipperier than a slippery slope argument.

There is no consciousness falser than that of the mind who sees false consciousness behind disagreements.

Thinking about thinking leads to errors about errors.

If you become enraged by the rage of others, you’ll justify rage.

The harder you look at something, the less you see your eyeball. And the harder you think about something the less you know your concepts.

 

Analethe

Philosophy

The hardest part of studying history is knowing how to factor out the ideas that were inconceivable to the actors of history at that time — and grasping the impact of how an absence of these concepts might change how events might seem.

It is not mere absence of fact, it is absence of an ability to even see a fact if it is standing before you staring into your eyes. If you are having difficulties knowing what I mean by this — and many do! — others who will come later will have difficulty grasping how it was for you to look through this concept without seeing it.

 

Design as gift (edit for 10ke)

Brand, Design, Geometric Meditations

Design is like gift-giving. How?

When one person gives another person a perfect gift, the gift is valuable in three ways:

  1. The gift itself is intrinsically valuable to the one receiving it. The giftis good to have in one’s life, because it makes life easier, more pleasant or more meaningful.
  2. The gift contributes to the receiver’s own self-understanding and identity. The gift becomes symbolic of the receiver’s own relationship to the world — an example what they experience as good, which can signify the recipient’s ideals in concrete form, in ways that explicit language often cannot.
  3. The perfection of the gift is evidence that the giver cares about and understands who the receiver is. The successful giving of a perfect gift demonstrates that the giver was moved to reflect on what the receiver will value and consequently has real insight into who they are as an individual and what they are all about.

Great design experiences are similar to gifts. When a design  is successful the beneficiary of the design gets something valuable, sees tangible proof they are valued and understood, and experiences an intensification or expansion of their sense of self.

Design and democracy

Design, Philosophy

(Here we go again, with another iteration of my engineering vs. designing theme.)

* * *

Design begins with trying to please. This naturally progresses to trying to understand better how to please, and later, trying to cultivate the best possible relationship — that is, a reciprocal one.

*

In situations where people are empowered and have choices, leaders naturally begin to rely on design approaches to persuade people to voluntarily participate in their systems.

In situations where people are disempowered and have few or no choices, leaders naturally begin to rely on engineering approaches to force people to comply to rules of their systems.

*

To engineer is to create systems of involuntary components.

To design is to create systems of voluntary and involuntary components.

To the degree the system relies on compulsion alone, it is engineered.

To the degree the system depends on volition, it is designed.

*

If the success of your system depends on people behaving in some particular way, two basic approaches are available:

  • Engineer it: purge the system of volitional variability so the entire mechanism functions like a well-oiled machine — reliably, predictably, repeatedly. Compel people to participate in the system with the behaviors required to support it. Make it their only viable choice. Remove choices, impose rules that support the system’s requirements.
  • Design it. Build volition into the system. Persuade  people to voluntarily participate in the system in ways that support it by making it their best choice. Provide new options, understand participants’ requirements, desires, attitudes, aspirations, unconscious hopes.

*

If someone tries to engineer you into a system, it might be that they have not yet fully developed an intersubjective consciousness (that is, they are on the autism spectrum).

Or they may think you lack choices, and are forcing you to do what they want simply because they can and there’s little you can do about it.

Or they may have not yet realized that many 20th Century management practices naturally produce autistic institutions, and that things can be otherwise. And that competition requires them to be. That their survival depends on it.

 

Designing users in

Philosophy

Generally we think about users as the people for whom a design is made. Designers build systems intended to be used by users.

But it might make more sense to see users as an intrinsic part of a design. Designers build  systems composed of non-human and human elements. (The designed artifact is only part of the system a designer develops.)

This might make it easier for designers to explain to engineers why it is necessary to include users in the design process — users are one of the most fundamental materials from which the system is made. What competent engineer would build something without first knowing the materials thoroughly? It would also help designers extend the scope of design to often neglected organizational considerations (governance, support, editorial process, etc.) that determine the success of the design.

Engineered systems are composed of objective materials. Designed systems are composed of both objective and subjective materials. Both must understood their materials to build good functional stuff.

Philosophy design

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Philosophy

For the last several weeks I have been trying very hard to care about Anglo-American analytic philosophy. In general, though, (with some exceptions) I have found its problems and approaches to resolving problems too tedious, too inapplicable and too dry to keep me engaged. It is cognitively, practically and aesthetically irrelevant to me.

Or to put it in UX language, for me, the experience is not useful, usable or desirable. I am not the user of this stuff.

I suspect the user of analytic philosophy is other professional philosophers who want to philosophize to other professional philosophers.

*

pirate_flag

Anglo-American analytic philosophy is the UNIX of philosophies.

My project is to design a Macintosh philosophy. (A well-designed thing to be used by people who don’t want to be forced to tinker with technicalities, unless they want to. And perhaps a thing that appeals especially to designers looking for tools to help them design better.)

*

Philosophy is a kind of design. It is a mind-reality interface.

Every philosophy permits us to render some aspects of reality intelligible, while confusing or obscuring others; supports us in some practical activities and while muddling others; helps us intensify the feeling of value of some things while devaluing others. In other words, a philosophy makes our life experience as a whole useful, usable and desirable. But like with every design, tradeoffs are necessary, and where to make these tradeoffs is a function of the user and the use context. We can be conscious about it and make these tradeoffs intentionally — or we can be like bad clients and persist in trying to have it all.

And as with all good designs, philosophies disappear.

*

Even bad interfaces disappear, leaving only frustration, alienation, friction, dissipation, confusion.

*

We would laugh at an argument over whether iOS or Android is truer. Maybe it is time we laugh at philosophical arguments the same way. Let other people  sit around and debate whose philosophy does the best job of representing the truth. I will do an experience assessment.

 

Persona Americana archive

Politics

I’ve been playing with the idea of creating a blog of passages taken from pre-War literature that display an American sense of identity that I feel has faded over the course of my lifetime.

I am thinking especially about two  authors I read heavily as a child, like Mark Twain and L. Frank Baum. I don’t have particular passages in mind, yet, but I do have a strong sense of Americanness that I believe I acquired from them:

  • pride in one’s own humble roots
  • a taste for directness bordering on roughness, delight in dispensing with dainty niceties
  • extreme practicality — take action without hesitation or theorizing
  • a stubborn sense of equality (often demonstrated in a disdain for class airs and thoroughgoing non-participation in aristocratic self-importance games)
  • “live and let live” elevated to the highest moral principle — commitment to defending the rights of others to think and do whatever they please with an expectation that this commitment be reciprocated
  • impish irreverence toward merely formal propriety
  • a cheerful can-do work ethic of plucky, industrious optimism
  • Settling an issue with one’s fists — followed by a handshake of respect, then friendship
  • thinking big — tastelessly big — Vegas Big
  • frankness, with non-concern for offending others with one’s opinions
  • self-sufficiency, ability to survive by one’s own wits
  • willingness to help a person in trouble, regardless of who the person is
  • disregard for irritable, moralistic, formalistic, sophisticated sensibilities

I am imagining a photoblog consisting of images of pages of books, each tagged by theme, and prominently featuring a tag cloud which hopefully over time might reflect the qualities of the ideal American character.

Split loyalties

Ethics

A persistent thought from the last several months: The best loyalties are dual, with a  foreground that is individual, particular and positive, and a background that is transcendent, universal and negative. The foreground is inspirational, but the background requires faith. A person who has only the former will be so full of passionate intensity he will be unable to constrain his violent impulses, and person who has only the latter will lack the convictions to uphold justice.

Somehow we must link the foreground of our loves, inspirations and concrete commitments, to the cool and unlovable universals that sustain our lives together.

Plan for a talk

Philosophy

Philosophy as noun (“a philosophy”) and philosophy as verb (“doing philosophy”) are not the same.

The activity of philosophy should not be sequestered pondering. Philosophy should be part of other activities — especially activities whose aim is innovation, where established effective methods of thinking do not yet exist.

I accept Wittgenstein’s characterization of philosophy: “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about’.”

Philosophy does three things:

  • Philosophy discovers as-yet-unposed problems.
  • Philosophy develops ways to think as-yet-unthinkable thoughts.
  • Philosophy integrates fragmentary knowledge into unified understandings.

A philosophy is a kind of design. A philosophy is an interface between a thinking being and reality.

Just like any design, a philosophy has a user (or “designand”), a purpose, a design context — and most of all, it requires trade-offs. And if it functions as it should it feels like a reality, not as an interpreted system of metaphors and images. Like any good design, a philosophy should disappear.

My belief is that philosophy is still in its pre-Macintosh phase. The user is other professional philosophers, the context tends to be professional forums — journals, conferences, etc. — and the trade-offs are usability and desirability, in favor of argumentative usefulness.

So, what I would like to present is my first attempt at a Macintosh GUI-style philosophy, abstracted from a life of user-centered design, (a.k.a. “design), to help me make sense of my designer’s life as a whole and to function better as a designer — and designed for usefulness, usability and most of all desirability.

This philosophy is built on a Pragmatist platform, and part of what that entails is that the ideas presented are not meant to represent a reality beyond us, but rather to help us behave toward reality in a way that is effective and beneficial, however we define it. So instead of telling you about what is real, I will present to you a set of mind-tools that I have found valuable for living the kind of life I have lived.

Again, I see this as an interface between me as a reflective designer and the reality I inhabit. I prefer graphical interfaces, so much of this philosophy will be graphical.

(At this point I will explain 3 or 4 of my diagrams in terms of what they do, when to use them, what the experience should be…)

(Time permitting, I will also present a few maxims, designed, again for use in specific contexts. We need pithy quotes to condense and drive home points we need to make. Why not make some specifically to forcefully express thoughts we need others to understand?)

Candidate maxims (I’ll probably choose 4 or 5):

  • Any engineer will tell you, to make a system that functions, you must thoroughly understand your materials. The systems designers make include materials who perceive, conceive, feel, decide and speak. “Know your user” means “know your materials.”
  • Realists must be connoisseurs of anxiety.
  • If you want complacent comfort follow your bliss, but if you want growth, follow your dread.
  • Inconceivable does not mean impossible or improbable. It means your mind is blind to something.
  • Blindness is not dark. It shimmers in uncanny perfection: nothing there, nothing missing.
  • When we look into darkness, nothing is there. When we are blind, nothing is missing.
  • Vision itself is not visible. It is “seen” only through reflection on the act of seeing things.
  • The man in the bar who wants to fight you wants to know you better. The bartender who listens to your life story does not.
  • An indication of genuine love: Taking another’s nonsense seriously, attentively, patiently, but, ultimately, critically.
  • Necessity is the mother of invention, but emergency is the father of regression.
  • A compassionate listener is stingier than a student greedily consuming what is said.
  • We resist deep change, not because we love the old or hate the new, but because of the intolerable span of dread that separates the old from the new.
  • Sleeping, the mind is permitted to repose in native chaos and to move by accident, but chaos is as immemorable as foreign speech.
  • Over breakfast, an evaporating dream is supplemented with a plot which displaces much of the dream’s truth — but which makes the dream memorable.
  • A new concept becomes retroactively obvious to all who come to understand it. Even the concept of retroactive obviousness is itself retroactively obvious. At one point, I myself forgot that I did not invent the expression “retroactive obviousness” because it was so much my own.
  • Concepts are the fingers of a comprehending mind. Con-cept, together-take. Com-prehend, together-grasp.
  • During the day, heaven’s clear black depths are obliterated by a bright expanse of blue.
  • Yogi Berra should have, but did not actually say: “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice; but in practice there is.”
  • On the stage, the most important actors have speaking parts, but in everyday life the opposite is true.

Added March 26, 2016

  • Logic is not reason. Logic without empathy and empathy without logic are both unreasonable. Reason is the coordination of logic and empathy. A reasonable person listens both empathically and logically to understand what is being said by the one saying it.
  • A concept is not a thing to be understood. A concept is that by which things are understood.
  • Once we use a concept for understanding things, it is inconceivable to understand things any other way.
  • We don’t love our old ideas, and we don’t hate new ones. What we hate is the intellectual vacuum separating old ideas from new ones: perplexity.
  • To understand in any new way we must first approach, then enter, then navigate and then exit perplexity

 

Design of etiquette

Philosophy

Every human system is designed (whether intentionally or not).

Every design makes tradeoffs (whether intended or not). A design makes some things effortless, other things difficult and other things nearly impossible.

The best designs help us forget those things the design does not do.

*

Etiquette is designed. It supports some kinds of human interactions and suppresses others.

If we want different kinds of interactions we must design them to make them possible. But if we do not wish to be rude we should not disregard etiquette. It is necessary to design new etiquette. And we should follow the rules of good design and respect our designands (a.k.a. “users”), at minimum by explaining the purpose of the etiquette, how it works and what to expect while participating in it — but ideally, beginning with the deepest possible understanding of the designands and their lifeworlds.

*

Everything is design.

An original insight

Philosophy

Without my endlessly frustrating friends, family and neighbors (who sometimes feel more like enemies) I would complacently confuse life as I’ve known it for reality itself, and fail to engage it fully with my heart, mind, soul and strength in that way that keeps it perpetually new, distressing, valuable and interesting. 

Pragmatically speaking, the otherness of other people and the otherness of unknown reality might as well be the same thing. 

A requirement to know/respect/love one entails a requirement to know/respect/love the other. They are alike. 

Agree

Philosophy

Issues of belief and non-belief are less common than we think.

A simple difference of opinion presupposes shared conceptualization (which at one point in my life I would have called “perspective”), that each differing opinion has been clarified in meaning and implications mapped, and, finally, that each opinion is actually about the same object (that is that it attempts to account for the same phenomena).

Perhaps a taxonomy of differences in thought might be helpful:

  1. Conclusional: have we arrived at the same belief? (Do we agree?)
  2. Logical: are our beliefs fully clarified, with all implications and doubts duly mapped out? (Are we clear?)
  3. Conceptual: are we conceptualizing the problem the same way and have we tried out alternative conceptualizations in order to compare them? (Are we aligned?)
  4. Phenomenal: are we working on the same problem, and are we responding to the same data? (Are we focused?)

The intrinsic conservatism of language

Hermeneutics

I starred the hell out of this footnote from Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature:

Such unconscious sleight-of-hand, when practiced by men of Descartes’s boldness of imagination, is an occasion for gratitude rather than censure. No great philosopher has avoided it, and no intellectual revolution could succeed without it. In “Kuhnian” terminology, no revolution can succeed which employs a vocabulary commensurable with the old, and thus none can succeed by employing arguments which make unequivocal use of terms shared with the traditional wisdom. So bad arguments for brilliant hunches must necessarily precede the normalization of a new vocabulary which incorporates the hunch. Given that new vocabulary, better arguments become possible, although these will always be found question-begging by the revolution’s victims.

Let us not pretend

Ethics

“We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the prejudices which we actually have when we enter upon the study of philosophy. These prejudices are not to be dispelled by a maxim, for they are things which it does not occur to us can be questioned. Hence this initial skepticism will be a mere self-deception, and not real doubt… Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.” – C. S. Peirce, “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities Claimed For Man”

This applies at least as much to ethics as it does epistemology.

Can we really doubt the immorality of the worst atrocities, even if we are unable to explain or account for morality?

This is a real living question, a doubt in my heart about the dubitability of morality.

 

Damaged tissues

Ethics

Richard Rorty, from Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature:

Presumably those who say that the phenomenal is nonphysical are not complaining that being told how the atoms of the bat’s brain are laid out will not help one feel like a bat. Understanding about the physiology of pain does not help us feel pain either, but why should we expect it to, any more than understanding aerodynamics will help us fly? How can we get from the undoubted fact that knowing how to use a physiological term (e.g., “stimulation of C-fibers”) will not necessarily help us use a phenomenological term (e.g., “pain”) to an ontological gap between the referents of the two terms? How can we get from the fact that knowing Martian physiology does not help us translate what the Martian says when we damage his tissues to the claim that he has got something immaterial we haven’t got?

Damaged tissues. I started worrying at this point about what kinds of tissues might constitute a person’s being, and what kinds of pain they produce when damaged. I kept thinking about an episode of On Being, featuring Jonathan Haidt where he discusses the more extensive sense of morality among conservative personalities. Are the tissues of a conservative’s being enmeshed in the customs of their community and the definitions of  words?

 

 

Alterior expressions

Philosophy, Pragmatism

A quick noting of a thought I had several weeks ago. It seems that the more an author writes in terms of present familiarities, alluding to fresh events of the moment that everyone understands and feels, the sooner the immediacy of the writing will expire. It is a tradeoff: the strategy of connecting ideas to the realities of present readers comes at a cost to connecting them to the realities of future readers, who will experience what was immediate as obscure allusions requiring footnotes and further study, or even as distracting errors if the allusions refer to beliefs requiring revisions (for instance, to discredited scientific notions or moral convictions). The most obscure writings of the present might become the most accessible writing to the future.

The reason this came to mind this morning is that it occurred to me that every form of immediacy might suffer from every kind of distance — temporal, temperamental, spacial, practical, etc..

Even our own immediate feelings can become incomprehensible over time as the fade into biography. This is a new way to see a thought I have been having now for over a decade. But it gives the idea a fresh new immediacy — today, anyway.

But also, our word-defying moods or insights — our sense of the poetic and religious — those might be the hardest immediacies to hold onto and remember, thus poems and prayers. We say them again, hear them again, beg them to return to us in their immediacy.

But thinking beyond the problems of our own private or communal recollections of past  immediacies, and factoring in the problems of communication with other people, these immediate experiences are difficult to convey and share with our most alterious alter-egos. Compounding the problem is the fact that the dread of beyondness clings to such alterior expressions adds daunting barriers to bridgeless gaps.

It might be that the most immediate realities cannot be spoken of in their own terms, but, if they are to be shared, must be refracted through and reflected off the myriad things of our sharable world. To be known at all, our subjectivities must run a circuit through the world we all intuit as one world, and present themselves as alternative objectivities belonging to a pluralistic world. But of course, the immediate reality of the world is that it is simply reality, and to view reality in a pluralistic light is to deny the most basic reality of this experience, so pluralism is not the innocent neutrality it seems to be to itself in its own immediacy.