I had to get a copy of Arthur C. Clarke’s Profiles of the Future, just so I could have a hard copy of his famous Third Law in my library: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Controlling the behavior of a system by controlling the behavior of will-less components: this is engineering. Engineering is concerned solely with the empirically observable outcome.

Influencing the actions of a system by influencing the free actions of its free-willed participants, and controlling behaviors of will-less components: this is design.

*

Design concerns itself with harnessing moral energies – inspiring individuals to put willingly and if possible enthusiastically join and participate in whatever system is being created. Designs require less energy to be pumped in from the outside: design systems seem to generate their own energy because people add energy into it willingly. They also “take part” willingly, they recognize themselves (even discover more of themselves) in performing whatever part the design offers them. The role is not imposed, and nobody is forced to play a role that feels unnatural or forced, because the system is designed around natural inclinations, existing self-images, even untapped potentials.

Engineering excludes moral energies from consideration. This is entirely appropriate when a system is made entirely of will-less elements. But “for a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail” — and for many engineers (especially young engineers who know everything because they can’t see how they do not know everything) who are men equipped with excellent engineering tools, everything looks like an engineering problem.

(And this, I will repeat once again, was the state of 19th-20th Century mainstream thought: to shape the world is to engineer it. Popular thought tended to either accept an active politics of social engineering or to reject active shaping altogether. This either-or, more than any other thing, produced the 20th century with its constant rationalist and irrationalist clashes, the left and the right, the liberals and the illiberals, taking turns playing at one extreme and then the other.)

If a person complies with socially engineered system, the goal is met. But engineered systems require monitoring, enforcement, rewards for compliance, punishments for non-compliance — in other words a constant influx of resources to fuel the human part of the system with motivations to act, and to enforce the performance of the roles the system requires of its component parts.

Somewhere between these two ideals of engineering and design is the whole field of psychological manipulation where behaviors are induced without coercion, but also without engagement of the will. Behavioral economics, advertising strategies designed to operate on an unconscious level, pick-up artistry, propaganda — these are in some ways worse than the brute coercion of social engineering, in the same way Brave New World is more horrifying than 1984.

I’m coining the term “scientistic method” to designate the practices that follow from scientism.

Some of the key characteristics of scientistic method:

• The belief that objectivity requires suppression of subjectivity.
• The belief that science is primarily quantitative, and not qualitative.
• Equating  method with algorithmic processes.
• Normalizing and enforcing normal discourse.
• Treating unmeasurables as merely imaginary and unreal (as opposed to realities that might eventually be made measurable).
• Overemphasis of implications of measurements; underemphasis of choice of what is measured.
• Exclusion of intuitive leaps from process (as opposed to testing them as a condition for inclusion).
• Decisions made on basis of quantitative data & argumentation (not hypothesis & experiment).

The more I reflect on my political attitudes the more I realize my liberalism is not very extreme. My liberalism has been extreme, but I’ve tempered it a great deal since it reached its peak intensity around 2004-2005.

Where have my attitudes changed?

I am less and less optimistic about a world where everyone wins. At best, we will have a world where the majority of people get a chance — if they manage to escape real but surmountable obstacles, which will be steeper, higher and slipperier for some than others. We should work to minimize unfairness, but traces of unfairness will continue to exist. 

I believe that -centricities of some form or another will always exist. Conceptual, behavioral and moral norms will — and ought to — be imposed. The unlimited increase of sensitivity toward infinitesimally subtle injustices creates incurable irritability (or maybe feeds preexisting irritability), and the desire to remove such injustice from the world is at best silly and at worst justification for far worse irritability-impelled injustices. 

I believe that marriage, parenting and education are coercive processes. If they are not, they stop producing human beings who are more than mere individuals. The extremes of liberalism produce antisocial human beings who fear or avoid all bonds of responsibility, and who cannot form enduring and substantial individual or institutional relationships. Mere individuals are not fully-developed human beings.

I believe that a small degree of illiberalism is necessary and desirable in a society, partly for the sake of the majority of people, who need a sense of stability and continuity and solidity to feel sane.

*

As I examine my beliefs and attempt to be as fair as possible in situating them, I realize that I am growing incredibly impatient toward what I see as the two greatest liberal absurdities, the left-liberal version, and the right-liberal libertarian version:

• The right-liberal libertarian absurdity is best illustrated by the Nolan Chart that converted me and so many of my friends to adopt a passively libertarian attitude toward politics in the late-80s. The absurdity lies in the facile notion that civil liberties and economic liberties can both be maximized both simply by not legislating or regulating in these areas. The very real fact that an unregulated private sector can and will produce private inequalities every bit as oppressive as those imposed by governments is ignored, at least in the popular (and politically impactful) version of this conceptualization of politics. I actually agree with left-liberals that the right-liberal absurdity is a recipe for a slide into oligarchic tyranny, and I’m even paranoid enough to believe that Ayn Rand longed for precisely this illiberal outcome (what I’ve been calling her “economic rape fantasies”).
• The left-liberal absurdity is the conceit that once equality is imposed (assuming that there even is an objective definition of equality, which there is not) and then achieved (assuming this is possible, which it is not), that the imposition can be removed or that it will simply disappear (which it most definitely will not do). I believe what right-liberals (real ones, like Hayek) say about the left-liberal absurdity — that a communist state is intrinsically and permanently illiberal.

Of course, on both these points I am just stating opinions, and doing nothing to support my opinion. But what I am really trying to do here (at least right now) is simply to articulate a position within a political landscape, and to contrast it with other positions with which it might be compared or confused.

And where I stand is in the upper region of the intersection of liberalism, where it intersects with the liberal goals of social democracy and conservative republicanism, solidly inside the boundaries of practicability: a region I have labeled “Liberal pluralism”. I believe it is legitimate to be more liberal than I am, and less liberal, more accepting of inequality and less tolerant of equality. If you are north of the line that divides liberalism and illiberalism, as far as I am concerned, you are not a political enemy, but an opponent worthy of respectful opposition. (Mouffe’s “agonistic” relationship.)

I have been collecting works of popular philosophy by accomplished physicists.

I think it would be fascinating to do a study on how these popular philosophies compare with one another, and also how they compare with scientism.

I would also be interested to compare scientisms with common forms of fundamentalism.*

(*Note: In my view, fundamentalism is not “religion gone too far” but religion misunderstood non-religiously. When ideas, symbols, practices, institutions are removed from the context of a philosophy in which such entities can make coherent and salvific sense, and instead comprehended in a degraded objective manner that requires fanaticism to counteract the sheer non-credibility of it all, fundamentalism results.)

My hypothesis is that scientism misunderstands and distorts science in the same way fundamentalisms misunderstand and distort religions.

And then I would suggest (but never conduct) a study comparing religious interpretations and misinterpretations (fundamentalisms at one extreme and esoteric mysticisms at the other) with scientific philosophical interpretations and misinterpretations (scientism on one extreme and facile skepticism on the other).

A person’s attitude toward science tells us much more about his attitudes toward his fellow human beings than it does with his attitudes toward nature.

To summarily reject the findings of science in favor of one’s own intuitive sense of truth means dismissing the collaborative efforts of some of the most brilliant, rigorous and critical practitioners to demonstrate to one another’s satisfaction the merits of competing understandings and to subject them to systematic scrutiny and challenge.

To place your own gut feelings on truth at the same level as the accounts produced by science, or even worse to refuse to understand and contend with science’s accounts — this violates two of the highest laws of reason, which might as well be one and the same: respect reality with your whole mind, with all your practices and your fundamental attitudes, and respect your neighbor’s truth as you respect your own.

Anyone who claims, suggests or tacitly assumes that intuitions are peaceful, delightful or otherwise benevolent hasn’t given the subject nearly enough thought.

A few minutes of concentrated reflection on one’s own life or on any span of history will turn up dozens of examples of clashes of intuitions provoked to violence by self-evidently outrageous claims of self-evident truths.

It is possible that no single intuition can, without the dubious aid of other intuitions, imagine how multiple conflicting self-evident truths could be valid, especially when this possibility is the furthest thing from self-evident.

Each intuition simply perceives what is and knows what it knows, and while its knowledge is far from complete, it has the gist of how everything hangs together and works. Something vast and mysterious might be sensed beyond or behind the world — but right here where things are happening, things are grasped by the mind for what they are.

Only unavoidable frustrations of neighboring intuitions making contradictory claims — the necessity of negotiating with unconquerable enemies — and the experience of sudden insight into the truth of their absurd claims — ratified by an overwhelming rush of respect and esteem that accompanies such insights — demonstrates to an intuition the truth that reality transcends every intuition at every point, not as a heaven that stands outside the mundane realm, but as a possibility packed into every conceivable thing. Simply hearing what another person says about things and, behind it, the everything to which every thing belongs, can call another heaven out of nowhere to pervade the universe, and to transfigure it. It is this immediate experience of transcendence that situates intuition within reality, instead of reality within intuition.

As difficult as it is to understand a concept that one has never understood, far more difficult is to un-understand a concept one has used to make sense of the world his whole life in order to understand by an alien perspective.

First, to un-understand one must painstakingly trace out all the facts comprehended by that concept, and these are not only extensive but elusive. In fact, often, without the aid of a concept facts are not only dark, but invisible as well: concepts don’t only provide answers, they raise questions out of sheer nonexistence, ex nihilo. It is not enough to remove the fact, the space of possibility in which the fact exists must be annihilated as well.

Second, once the concept is gone, any remaining trace of problem left behind will become a psychic irritant, a speck of dread, a source of anxiety accompanied by an urgent impulse to resolve it. But one has already solved this problem — the impulse to play Euridice or Lot’s wife will be irresistible. The mind abhors a vacuum, and it will fill the problem with a reflexive question, and the answer will follow, the same as before.

It is for this reason that we cannot go back to the past. We cannot even approach Eden, much less enter it — at least not as the ones who left it. Each time we add a book to scripture, the previous books are irreversibly transfigured and any attempt to recapture the spirit of the original can only concatenate a new (and hopefully better) meaning.

We will not unforget the past because what is there is not only lost knowledge but ignorance irretrievably lost, without which the spirit of the past is inexperiencable. We cannot unforget unless we reforget, and reforgetting is impossible.

We will have to content ourselves with retrieving what we can in the light that illuminates today. What we retrieve might change that light, but we must never mistake that light for the sun that lit Eden, the newly-built Monticello, or Sam Phillip’s face as he walked into Sun Studio.

*

Anamnesis is impossible because it requires the impossible: reamnesis.

I used to understand science to promise (or, for me, to threaten) to make the pluralistic mess of humanity a mere epiphenomenon of simple non-human algorithmic processes, capable of being grasped entirely without the slightest empathic insight. When I saw things this way I was suspicious of science, and wanted to see its validity confined.

Once I re-understood science as a peaceful method for evaluating, challenging and clarifying or re-working the pluralistic mess of humanity, I changed my attitude toward it. Science provides clarity around irreducibly multiple forms of life, and helps improve these forms of life.

*

Scientific method can be applied to any species of problem, and whatever it touches is democratized and civilized. I realize now that what made me fall in love with design research early in my career — how it changed the spirit of teamwork, transforming dogmatic answers championed by competing geniuses into dramatic questions and opportunities to solve problems gripping and fascinating a community of problem-solvers — was the true spirit of science.

*

Science permits two or more people to gather in the name of reason and to invite a greater enveloping being into their midst, in whom one becomes a participant. Here, two principles of science are combined into one principle, the highest principle, which itself could be seen as a third principle: 1) Respect what your colleague says, and try to understand what is being said as your own understanding, and 2) do this out of respect for reality itself — reality which is infinitely vast and which will always involve but transcend each individual’s mind — but which becomes more accessible and intimate to each of us when we listen to one another with tenacious and optimistic expectation. And 3) these two principles are essentially one, and become false if divided into two and applied independently without the other.

Two counter-intuitive interpretations of gut feelings guide my ethical actions:

1. The heat of hubris.
   I always try to catch and interrogate this feeling wherever it happens, especially when it is accompanied by iron-clad justification and and sublimates into majestic righteousness. If it feels like hubris, I assume it is hubris, and if that hubris can be justified, the justification is probably the logic of hubris.
2. The outrage of anxiety.
   This very distinct feeling, taken at face value, indicates one is being assailed by some form of moral and/or intellectual wrongness. I’ve come to interpret it as approaching impingement of beyondness — a hint of dread of the infinite. The subject of my anxiety cannot be subsumed within my current understanding. I can keep my understanding intact and repel the assailant, or I can welcome the assailant with the faith that if I sacrifice my private understanding in the right spirit I have the opportunity to re-understand: to undergo metanoia.

Some other less counter-intuitive gut feelings:

1. The darkening of betrayal.
   When a person close to me undergoes a deep perspective shift that inclines them away from me, it is often signaled by a dark and heavy feeling. It is peculiarly non-directional like a bass frequency, and it is not clear from the feeling who has shifted — only that someone has shifted.
2. The hangover of sin.
   When I do something wrong, even if I can justify it entirely, I feel a distinctive sickness afterwards. I’ve come to trust this feeling over my own arguments. When I feel this sensation, I assume a working attitude that I am in the wrong, and switch from self-justification to self-interrogation.
3. The fluency of grace.
   I can feel it when I am in the right place to speak and act. The sensation is indescribable but unmistakeable: an attunement to the situation, clarity on what matters and assurance that success will follow.
4. The release of reconciliation.
   There is a distinctive untightening sense that comes with the realization that a person you are in conflict with is more important than anything else involved in the conflict. It is palpable when it happens to oneself, and, strangely just as much as when it happens to the other.
5. The wrinkliness of incomplete thought.
   When I have an understanding that is not yet worked out fully, and it seems that some unconsidered factor is preventing it from resolving, this comes with a feeling that the problem is not “lying flat”, which might sound like a metaphor, but is actually a description of a feeling about the thought.

I believe in the right to require persuasion as a condition of participation — but this right is accompanied by a two-fold obligation: 1) to persuade and 2) to be open to being persuaded.

I believe every human being has an equal right to be regarded as an individual.

By extension, I believe every individual has the right to voluntarily associate or disassociate with any political body, and that no organic consideration (sex, race, class, etc.) may override it. This is principled non-prejudice.

I believe truth is a matter of trade-offs. Especially when it seems logically impossible, there is an otherwise. Practical awareness of this fact is a major component of what has been known as wisdom. Wisdom is incomplete without otherwisdom.

I believe in the perpetual possibility of radical surprise, and that we feel its approach as anxiety, its arrival as dread and its overcoming as epiphany.

Religion that lacks practical attitudes toward otherwisdom, expectation of radical surprise and navigation of dread is pseudo-religion. Fundamentalism is not religious extremism, religion gone too far; fundamentalism is religion betrayed.

For my book, I am trying to create a limited palette of words with technical meanings. I will allow myself a few simple unbeautiful technical-sounding words. For instance, it seems alterity and pluralism will be unavoidable. These will be defined and used with discipline and precision wherever they occur. I also plan to pick apart some common synonyms:

• Real, actual, existent.
• True, correct, right.
• Reasonable, rational, logical.
• Mistake, misconception, error.
• Concept, idea, thought.
• Insight, fact, truth.
• Practice, action, behavior.

The rest will be concrete and durable words likely to remain immediate (“Experience-near” in Geertz’s words), but also likely to introduce some imprecision, interpretive ambiguity and freedom into the reading. I’ll try to protect against any abuses I can anticipate, but I am a pluralist at heart and I celebrate conflict.

Arthur C. Clarke formulated Three Laws of prediction:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

*

I hold the obnoxious belief that religions are technologies — philosophical technologies — and that a magical interpretation of what religions say and do is symptomatic of insufficient understanding. Religious thinking requires an ontological sophistication beyond that of most religious minds, so they do the best they can, but in the process they make category mistakes (which, if I am not mistaken is just ontological errors recast in pragmatist terms) which grow together into a distorted conceptual system. But perhaps even worse is a simplistic leveling-down of religion into ethical guidelines and sentiments. Most battles over religion are between these two flawed conceptions of religion: the superstitious vs the secular.

*

Magical thought is the splattering of comprehension against the limits of thinkability. Thinkability, however is relative. We can learn to think new kinds of thoughts — consequential thoughts — thoughts that induce comprehensive rethought, also known as metanoia.

*

Magic is permanent complacence in the face of transcendent ideas — and it might even be the sin against the spirit, if we recognize that spirit is mobile thought. It is for this reason — not because I think magic “doesn’t exist” — that I oppose magical thought: it blunts the mind against transcending itself. Magic is bad practice.

Sometimes I think the Long Tail is more of a curse than a blessing. It puts so many forks in every possible road that nobody is likely to follow the same route for long. Instead the freeways of common interest that existed prior to internet “communities”, there is a dense mesh of criss-crossing footpaths (so dense it might as well be a solid sheet of pavement) scattered with isolated obsessive nerds.

Do I want to go back to the constricted choices of the pre-internet days? Probably not. There are costs, though, and I feel them most acutely when I finish reading something difficult and fascinating and start flipping through my mental rolodex in search of someone to hash through it with me.

Reading Peirce 1903 Harvard lectures on Pragmatism, the self-similar structure of Peirce’s categories of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness. Here is my redrawing of his diagram:

And here it is again, color-coded to highlight the degenerate forms.