An outline of my meager understanding of the history of science:

1. Informal natural observation; unsystematic explanation
2. Informal natural observation; systematic metaphysical explanation
3. Formal natural observation; systematic metaphysical explanation
4. Formal natural observation; systematic metaphysical/mathematical explanation
5. Artificial experiment; systematic metaphysical/mathematical(?) explanation
6. Artificial experiment; systematic phenomenological/mathematical(?) explanation

I’m thinking of reading Koyre’s From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe in order to get a basic, probably outdated, plot-line to work with.

Why do I care? I want to paint business as being stuck back at step 4, and make a case for progressing to step 6. And yes, I’m whigging.

The excessive specificity of scholarly monographs can seem ridiculous from the outside, but the most explosive insights are located between the banal minutiae and irrelevant anomalies of human life.

splitting the atom : physics :: splitting hairs : humanities

I’ve never believed that Nietzsche’s will to power was meant to be something that belongs solely to individuals, nor that it takes the form of domination. Groups of people have a will to power, as much as the individuals who constitute groups, as do the psychic subdivisions within an individual psyche. And this will to power can manifest and resolve itself in myriad ways, sometimes through coercion, but often through alliance.

Nietzsche was a reductionist — reducing all human and even natural actions to the universal animating force of the will to power — but this force was understood to undergo rich transformations and sublimations in its journey from inorganic to organic to social life, and it is crucial to note both that Nietzsche did stratify and rank these transformations, noted their changes in character as they elevated in rank.

In its infancy a models helps us conceptualize complexity, and helps us orient ourselves within a problem that would otherwise be experienced as bewildering chaos.

Later as the model matures it help us manage complexity, and helps us keep large numbers of details organized so we can capture, present and recall them.

Research that develops models where no adequate models exist has relies more on philosophical thought. Research that uses and populates existing models relies more on observational skills.

Natural science : technology :: social science : design

Human nature is artificiality.

Humankind has co-evolved with the civilizations we have built and inhabited. Under the pressures of these artificial habitats (which include not only what we live in, but live with and use), we have biologically evolved and become capable of rebuilding our civilizations in new ways — within which, and with which, we further biologically evolve.

Human beings as we are now have never existed apart from civilization, and would be incomplete alone and in the wilderness. The belief that we’d be better off without civilization is artifice, but artifice discordant with our true artificial natures.

*

Humankind and civilization are the twin children produced by humankind and civilization, who will parent the next twins. We belong to an interminable double-helix chain of bio-artifice incest stretching behind us and before us. We blind ourselves with Origin stories of perfection lost and regained.

*

Don’t even try to make arguments based on what is and is not natural. In human existence, nothing is natural. The best we have is second-nature: some things seem or feel natural, and other things can come to seem or feel natural, and these second-natures vary from individual to individual. If you take this fact (the pluralistic fact) seriously enough to make attempts to learn the specifics of varying experiences of naturalness, which differs from psychic economy to psychic economy, you’ll approach truth instead of shrinking from it.

*

Conservatives who hate the idea of evolution should take extreme care to avoid understanding the concept of co-evolution. Evolution is training wheels for the shock of its logical progression to co-evolution.

We’d better protect the sanctimony of our individual marriage customs, because collectively we are a polygamous, incestuous, bestial, technophilic monsters, marrying and mating with animals, household appliances and anything that moves (or fails to move fast enough to escape our embrace) for dozens of millennia.

We’ve done all sorts of crazy things to ourselves as a species, and who’s to judge what ought to or ought not to have happened? Actually, we will, and in the process we will do yet more crazy things to ourselves.

*

My new definition of design: humans artificing and doing crazy things to ourselves.

I could be accused of Romanticism in one respect: I place enormous emphasis on psychic economy. In a society, morale is a matter of life and death.

*

The way a person how a person lives, inhabits and conceptualizes life makes that person want to live, grow, flourish and expand, or it makes a person indifferent to what happens.

*

Life is lived most skillfully when we value it, and we value life most when we live it skillfully. If we wish to survive, we must work to flourish. If we do not flourish, we will not care if we outlive ourselves, and we will place our hopes in death. If we do not flourish we will feel no more than affection for our children and grandchildren, loving them only with our “hearts”, but not with our minds and bodies.

*

Generation X, the “apathetic generation”, understands the vital importance of the psychic economy. We were commanded to care, but never shown why to care nor how to care, so we simply abstained from all gestures of caring. Only as adults, partly through becoming parents, did we begin to understand the problem of caring: of value.

This is why we are reinventing brand, modeling it on the only institutions we were able to value in our youth: in bands.

There’s something consummating about entering the Cyborg Manifesto into my wiki, my own dear spirit-prosthetic, who helps me recall myself when I’ve forgotten who I am trying to be/come.

Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble quoted some passages from Elizabeth V. Spelman’s essay “Woman as Body: Ancient and Contemporary Views” that captured my interest enough that I found a copy and read it this morning. Here’s one of the finest zingers in the piece:

In this essay she mentions another unpublished piece I’d like to read, ‘Metaphysics and Misogyny’. The connection between religious faith, traditional metaphysical conceptions, preference for hierarchical power structures, aversion to matter and the senses, xenophobia, readiness to use violence and subjugation of women are becoming clearer to me.

The pragmatic formula for a role: “You are __________ , therefore you should __________ .” The question to ask is whether a role with an acceptable “therefore” exists and is accessible to the one who will be expected to fulfill it.

Soft systems are systems that include as part of the system human participants whose various interpretations and responses help regulate the workings of the system.

Hard systems are systems that do not include an interpretive human element and are assumed to be regulated entirely algorithmically.

Hard systems are engineered.

Soft systems are designed.

*

The signature error of the 20th Century was to mistake soft systems problems for hard systems problems, and to attempt to engineer solutions where design was needed.

This bit from the introduction to Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is very exciting to me:

Chapter seven interprets the traditional distinction between the search for “objective knowledge” and other, less privileged, areas of human activity as merely the distinction between “normal discourse” and “abnormal discourse.” Normal discourse (a generalization of Kuhn’s notion of “normal science”) is any discourse (scientific, political, theological, or whatever) which embodies agreed-upon criteria for reaching agreement; abnormal discourse is any which lacks such criteria. I argue that the attempt (which has defined traditional philosophy) to explicate “rationality” and “objectivity” in terms of conditions of accurate representation is a self-deceptive effort to eternalize the normal discourse of the day, and that, since the Greeks, philosophy’s self-image has been dominated by this attempt.

“Abnormal discourse.” I like that term. Consider: anoma + logos.

There is more to reality than is speakable, and there is more to possibility than is predictable.

*

Without the concrete-reality-between, each mind is solitary confinement.

Without experiment, reality lies on a linguistic Procrustean bed.

*

The purpose of ethics is the preservation of a particular ethos, and its essence is making and keeping promises.

The purpose of morality is the valuing of existence, and its essence is transcendence (that is, the intuition that our experience shows us the surface of something that extends beyond experience).

To every perspective there belongs practical and factual intricacies which serve to reinforce the perspective by demanding full and exclusive participation in reality in its own terms, which induces what I will call, perspectival amnesia through occupation and displacement.

Full participation in any one perspective makes all other perspectives unintelligible. In fact, it conceals the phenomenon of perspective itself (pluralism), and reduces pluralism to mere diversity of opinion on fact, feeling, custom, temperament, moral character, etc.

Full participation in one perspective creates ideal conditions for naive realism, which is the environment most practical people need to feel safe and sane. Wherever you find compulsively busy people, compelled to play hard (or intoxicate themselves) the second they’re finished working hard, you are witnessing the mechanics of self-preservation.

*

A perspective that develops into an ethos fully-equipped with an ethic, a language, a history and a catalog of categories, facts, techniques and well-worn paths of inquiry creates a pocket of stable naive realism. This is my cynical definition of a brand, and it is the goal of my work: to create nice habitable delusions for people who crave shelter from chaos, anxiety, perplexity and mystery. A deep brand is actually a philosophy pregnant with ethical, practical and factual possibilities, capable of creating fulfilling (fully-filling) social relationships between people and things.

*

For all these reasons, I resist getting bogged down in the development of details. My job is to go in precisely the opposite direction from preservation and refinement. For the sake of creating concrete plurality, I try to navigate out of pockets of naive realism that belong to whole industries, in order to discover and stake out new pockets of naive realism that belong to smaller organization who which to differentiate themselves. But discovering and staking out is not the same as settling and establishing. Once a new vision has taken root, it is time for the next project.

*

“Abraham”

The rivulet-loving wanderer Abraham
Through waterless wastes tracing his fields of pasture
Led his Chaldean herds and fattening flocks
With the meandering art of wavering water
That seeks and finds, yet does not know its way.
He came, rested and prospered, and went on,
Scattering behind him little pastoral kingdoms,
And over each one its own particular sky,
Not the great rounded sky through which he journeyed,
That went with him but when he rested changed.
His mind was full of names
Learned from strange peoples speaking alien tongues,
And all that was theirs one day he would inherit.
He died content and full of years, though still
The Promise had not come, and left his bones,
Far from his father’s house, in alien Canaan.

– Edwin Muir

I would love to have a metal 3D print of a hyperdodecahedron, but I’ll probably order one in plastic first. The reason I want it: it is a symbol, which, like the Mandelbrot Set, has been given to us by technology, both in its physical form and its precise meaning. Until recently it has been intuited darkly — that is, in magical terms.

It would be incredibly cool if the plastic had properties that allowed the to be hyperverted to permit each of its 120 cells to be outermost.

If you get mixed up in philosophy or religion, you’re essentially signing up for a perpetual crash course in what it feels like to be a Dunning-Kruger case. Tolerating it requires humility bordering on hubris.