Choose one: 1) Love of your worldview. 2) Love of other living beings.
All posts by anomalogue
On precision inspiration
Design researchers are look for two things: 1) precision inspiration (ideas capable of stimulate great quantities of viable concepts), and 2) criteria for assessing the viability of concepts.
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What is inspiration? Inspiration is what happens when a person’s perspective is shifted and suddenly — miraculously — inconceivable ideas become conceivable, freeing insoluble problems to solve themselves.
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The most reliable source of inspiration is other people.
When one person allows another person to inspire him, he becomes far more capable of inspiring the other.
The exchange of inspiration is the finest, most welcome bond.
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Imagine a brand based on the exchange of inspiration carried out through the medium of design.
Serres’ pragmatogony
“I imagine, at the origin, a rapid whirlwind in which the transcendental constitution of the object by the subject would be nourished, as in return, by the symmetrical constitution of the subject by the object, in crushing semicycles that are endlessly begun anew, returning to the origin. … There exists a transcendental objective, a constitutive condition of the subje t through the appearance of the object as object in general. Of the inverse or symmetrical condition on the whirling cycle, we have testimony, traces or narratives, written in the labile languages. … But of the direct constitutive condition on the basis of the object we have witnesses that are tangible, visible, concrete, formidable, tacit. However far back we go in talkative history or silent prehistory, they are still there.” — Michael Serres
Group creativity
Thinking is reasonable, but sterile.
Intuition is fertile, but tyrannical.
Group creativity requires both fertility and reason.
Skeptic researcher
A researcher who read too much asked his client a question rarely asked in business:
“Imagine you had a choice of two research documents, one red and one blue. The red document provides a comprehensive and highly accurate account of the situation your company is facing. However if this document is fully understood and believed it will overwhelm your employees with possibilities, open new controversies and make it ten times harder to make decisions. The blue document is much less comprehensive and less factual than the first. In fact many hard-nosed realists will find it abstract and even a little vague. However, this document is understood and believed, it will make your employees feel that they have a handle on your company’s situation, they’ll find it easier to come to agreements, and those agreements will be ones that will profit your company.”
ANTsy Nietzsche
From Nietzsche’s Late Notebooks:
Mechanical force is known to us only as a feeling of resistance: and pressing and pushing are only palpable interpretations of this, not explanations.
What is the nature of the coercion that a stronger soul exerts upon a weaker one? — And it would be possible that what seemed to be ‘disobedience’ to the higher soul actually arose from a failure to understand its will, e.g., a rock cannot be commanded. But — the differentiation of degree and rank must be gradual: only the closest relatives can understand each other, and consequently it’s here that there can be obedience.
Might it be possible to view all movements as signs of psychological happenings? Natural science as a symptomatology —
It may be wrong to take the fact that the formations of life are very small (e.g., cells) as a reason to search for even smaller units, ‘force-points’, etc. ?
The preliminary stage of structures of mastery.
Devotion to the person (father, forebear, prince, priest, god) as facilitating morality.
Ideas and observations
What sort of economic conditions would arise if, instead of basing our currency on some quantum of precious metal, we instead based it on the precise amount of happiness destroyed in earning it? So, the purchaser of a 50 cent pack of gum would labor at some painfully tedious or loathsome task until he has sacrificed a quantum of happiness exactly equaling that gained from chewing a pack of gum. A house would cost exactly the sum of happiness of inhabiting it. That seems exactly fair to me.
Debooking
I’m starting to want to get rid of all my books. I never regretted getting rid of my records.
Ecumenic age
According to Eric Voegelin (in Order and History Vol. 4: The Ecumenic Age) during the epoch spanning the rise of Persian empire and the fall of the Roman Empire the nature of religion changed radically. Faced with the scale and sheer power of great expanding empires, no individual had sufficient power to change the course of political life in his community to any significant degree. As political activity became synonymous with unfreedom, new religions arose which offered private freedom for individuals and small communities who withdrew from public life and lived subculturally. Prior to this religion and politics were inseparable, but afterwards, religion and politics were separate on principle.
Like it or not, this was the origin of Christianity and it is deeply at odds with what happened to Christianity when it became the official religion of Rome, the most powerful and public-minded empire that ever existed. The outright contradictions introduced in this development still dominate our culture. This is why Christian nationalists require armies of theologicians to help them comb out the abundant knots and tangles from the simple words of their founder, whose meaning is clear if one is prepared to accept their consequences. But lawyers are all about avoidance of consequences, not by avoidance of legal knowledge, but through such great mastery of legal knowledge that they can be unwoven and rewoven to suit the desires of the client.
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The most powerful and rapidly expanding empire in the world today is western corporate capitalism. The power of this new world order dwarfs that of Rome. This new empire’s rule is so universal — so widespread and so deep — that there is no room even in the privacy of one’s mind to evade it. It imposes its strict though often unwritten laws on all human activity, not only on how one behaves, but even on the types of ideas a person can think and how those ideas are thought. This tyranny is enforced in the name of sound method.
So now, even the unprecedented narrowing of the sphere of personal autonomy introduced by the Ecumenic Age religions are breached. Further, the ways of life permitted for modern ascetics — academia and boheminism (and even of entrepreneurship) — are also constricting or evaporating. They’re allying themselves with the empire, “getting cut”, or drying up, as fewer and fewer desire anything outside of the empire. There are fewer places to hide. The remaining few ascetics live in their ghettos reassuring one another that things have gotten as bad as they possibly can.
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Alienation, like parenting, has become an extravagant luxury afforded to fewer and fewer people. Despite the abundance of material goods, contemporary life demands constant feeding of every man and woman and child’s total store of time and energy. Corporate capitalism is a jealous master who requires shows of contempt for all rival powers — and that contempt manifests as a denial of conflict between the conflicting powers. In an argument, what could be more contemptuous to deny the fact that the other’s point conflicts at all with one’s superior point?
To live one must participate in trade, and to participate in trade requires direct or indirect participation in corporate life, and that demands the entirety of one’s mind, one’s body, and one’s heart.
What’s it for?
The unification of existence through the establishment of explicit relationships among observed phenomena is the discipline of science.
The unification of existence through the establishment of shared purpose among beings capable of sharing purpose is the discipline of religion.
The unification of existence through participation in one’s community is the discipline of practicality.
The unification of the entirety of existence as one experiences it is the discipline of philosophy.
Some people will “have a philosophy” that is only science, only religion or only practicality, and that is fine.
When arguing with someone, it is helpful to note where they miss, ignore, deny, observe, invent or imagine distinctions.
Foreground-background switch
I’m considering subbing this for the staircase illusion in my “Dialogue presentation”.
I’m also thinking about including Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit.
A friend of mine says she heard of a word for this kind of mental shift, but she can’t remember it.
Antitheses and antidotes
Many of us try to overcome near-sightedness with far-sightedness.
Antitheses are rarely antidotes.
Myopia
An atom is more myopic than an amoeba, and an amoeba is more myopic than a bird. An employee is (generally) more myopic than a CEO. A whole human being is less myopic than his brain alone, and a human being in society is less myopic than an isolated individual. It is possible to conceive of a god as the least myopic being.
Pascal’s sphere
The too-human gods attacked by Xenophanes were reduced to poetic fictions or to demons, but it was said that one god, Hermes Trismegistus, had dictated a variously estimited number of books (42, according to Clement of Alexandria; 20,000, according to Iamblichus; 36,525, according to the priests of Thoth, who is also Hermes), on whose pages all things were written. Fragments of that illusory library, compiled or forged since the third century, form the so-called Hermetica. In one part of the Asclepius, which was also attributed to Trismegistus, the twelfth-century French theologian, Alain de Lille — Alanus de Insulis — discovered this formula which future generations would not forget: “God is an intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” The Pre-Socratics spoke of an endless sphere; Albertelli (like Aristotle before him) thinks that such a statement is a contradictio in adjecto, because the subject and predicate negate each other. Possibly so, but the formula of the Hermetic books almost entitles us to envisage that sphere. In the thirteenth century the image it reappeared in the symbolic Roman de la Rose, which attributed it to Plato, and in the Speculum Triplex encyclopedia. In the sixteenth century the last chapter of the last book of Pantagruel referred to “that intellectual sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere, which we call God.” For the medieval mind, the meaning was clear: God is in each one of his creatures, but is not limited by any one of them.
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The first person perspective is concave.
The third person perspective is convex.
The second person perspective is not so easy to characterize.
OPP
Obligatory Passage Point (OPP) is going to be a useful concept. From Wikipedia:
Obligatory passage points are a feature of actor-networks, usually associated with the initial (problematization) phase of a translation process. An OPP can be thought of as the narrow end of a funnel, that forces the actors to converge on a certain topic, purpose or question. The OPP thereby becomes a necessary element for the formation of a network and an action program. The OPP thereby mediates all interactions between actors in a network and defines the action program. Obligatory passage points allow for local networks to set up negotiation spaces that allow them a degree of autonomy from the global network of involved actors.
To put it in Jamesian language, the “cash value” of all ideas involved in a social situation transacts at the OPP — for a social scientist, at least, who is interested in accounting for the transpiring of events. Is there any perspective deeper than that? (I’ll leave that question open.)
The principle of principles
As the breadth of usefulness of an observed pattern increases, and the pattern becomes detached from any one specific situation (or to put it differently, attachable to a large number of otherwise dissimilar situations), the pattern will more and more be conceptualized as a principle.
Because the best means of increasing breadth of applicability of a pattern is abstraction, it can appear that principles are purely abstract, which is true in a sense, but not in the commonsense sense.
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It’s funny that the etymology of the word “principle” comes from the Latin word principium ‘source,’ from princeps, princip– ‘first, chief.’ This suggests that a principle comes first, and this is certainly how we tend to interpret principles. However, in truth what appears to come first actually comes last, and what seems to command the behavior of phenomena actually follows.
From, for and within
Just as science is not really a body of knowledge on what is true about things, but rather the record of disciplined interactions human beings have with things, with a focus on the patterns that predictably occur when certain conditions are in place… philosophy is not really the truth of how human beings necessarily relate to existence (“the human condition”), but rather the record of individuals (who belong to societies) trying to make coherent and comprehensive sense of their own experience, as defined by what they take to be relevant, which is intimately connected with what that individual wishes to do in the world. Existence might be conceptualized in thingly objective terms, or psychological, intellectual, logical, political, experiential, moral, etc. terms.
And because what people take to be relevant varies from person to person — (and perhaps varies most dramatically between the type who decides to conceptualize his experience versus a type who simply interacts with whatever he encounters) — different people will have different philosophies, which will enable them to interact with the world in some very particular way, perhaps as a scientist or a philosopher, but maybe as a salesperson or a respiratory therapist or a concierge or a politician.
So, both science and philosophy attempt to relate to the whole of reality, but always from, for and within some purpose, outside of which there is nothing but the mystery of the possibility of learning and changing. In any intellectual activity an actor is always someone relating something, whether the emphasis is on the someone or on the something and even if that something is taken to be fellow someone/something actors.
I think my use of this approach to relating myself to existence, which includes as a consideration other people approaching existence differently from myself makes me a pragmatist. Never forget: American Pragmatism was a response to the experience of the Civil War.
Forgetting tacit knowledge
It is hard to recognize the forgetting of tacit knowledge, especially when the tacit knowledge is knowing how to think certain thoughts. When we are able to recall all the facts but don’t know what to make of it anymore, that’s a strange feeling we don’t know how to talk about.
Whatless
Some people are born knowing “what” they are. Some have no such “what” — and consequently must resort to thinking in terms of “who”.
Making ideas real
When I was younger I had a set of friends to whom I “brought home” new ideas. Until I shared it with each of them, a new idea was not fully real to me.