i.want.world

Ideas are just the things that go on in our minds. Perceptions, imagination, thoughts. Everyone seems to be on board with the suggestion that, you know, ideas couldn't exist without minds. Right? That seems straightforward, right? If no minds existed to percieve things, then how could anyone have ideas? If minds didn't exist, what would feel the sensation of getting burned? Nothing.

Okay. So, uh, why do people think that shit exists outside the mind, too? How does that even fucking happen? That shit does not make sense. Here are the things that we know exist: the things we percieve. Here are the things we percieve: the things that there are. That's it! That's all there is! Want proof? Watch this: try to think of something that exists without existing in a mind somewhere. Got it? Good. Gotcha bitch. IT'S IN YOUR MIND oh snap you just got told.

 

Best read last week.

Life at Low Reynolds Number

Some mathematical facts are true for no reason. They are accidental, lacking any cause or deeper meaning. This is an apparent attribute of any dynamical system which we try to model mathematically. And so are the facts of our chaotic environment which we call nature.

In our quest for understanding, we are becoming more and more aware of the complexity in seeking certainty in a world overladen with information. It isn't that there is too much information, it is the simple fact that we humans will never come to a point at understanding them.

Seeking patterns, forming algorithms and measuring their affects is a futile endeavor. Gödel's incompleteness theory, Shannon's mathematical theory of communication and Chaitin's path of incompleteness to chaos all show when observing the universe as is, it is impossible to come to an algorithm, a compression method or an encoding scheme to predict the next move or event.

Yet we humans are drawn to patterns willy-nilly. We invent elaborate tools and mind past data with a toothpick in order to predict and sniff out tendencies in the financial markets and social sciences so that we can make our next buck. Case:

Mirghaemi spent two years using Bayesian techniques to study how European bond markets responded to 3,077 separate releases of economic data between 2007 and 2008. She studied 1.6 million bond trades and figured out which pieces of news moved the markets more, and which ones analysts and traders were more likely to forecast poorly. "It made my eyesight like a double," she said. But Mirghaemi's research should now, in theory, allow traders, and trading algorithms, to position themselves better on an hour-by-hour basis. "It definitely makes money," she said.

How much information is really in 3,077 separate releases of economic data and 1.6 million bond trades ? These data, we could argue, are points in time, a sequence of events which had not been able to be predicted - hence her research. Can these sequence of events be truly random? Mathematically, it is impossible to prove that a number is random. So physicists and mathematicians alike have relied on proving the opposite: that a number or sequence of events N are interesting i.e. non-random by finding an algorithm for N.

Even though most positive integers are uninteresting (i.e. Random).., you can never be sure, you can never prove it---although there may be a finite number of exceptions. But you can only prove it in a small number of cases. So most positive integers are uninteresting or algorithmically incompressible, but you can almost never be sure in individual cases, even though it's overwhelmingly likely.

I can imagine one could try to prove that a data point is random by brute force, by implementing every known algorithm in a computer and test it against these data sets. But what you would get is algorithms testing other algorithms. A paradox.  A recursive self looping nut.

But we are drawn to these 1.6 million bond trades because they seem to not exhibit total randomness. If they were redundant, meaning all trades had the same attributes, we would again claim that no information exists amongst the numbers. As Shannon proved, information is surprise. It is when in a sequence of events where the next occurrence appears as a surprise that we find value and information.

The 1.6 million trades, this data set, is neither of these extremes: random nor redundant. Though, they indeed have information so this is the exact reason why we are meticulously trying to invent an algorithm which can be used to replicate its sequence. A futile undertaking.

For the problem is, we live in a nonlinear complex dynamical system and it is full of irrational agents - us. Finding a rational algorithm to predict an irrational dynamical system is like asking God to rigg the dice when there is no God.

The confirmation that senior Haitian officials hold foreign nationality lends growing credence to a leading senator’s charge that Haitian President Michel Martelly is a U.S. citizen and hence illegally in power.

Two weeks ago, Sen. Moïse Jean Charles submitted what he called “irrefutable” evidence to a special Senate Select Committee that Martelly and 38 other high government officials hold dual, and sometimes triple, nationalities.

On Jan. 24, Sen. Joseph Lambert, the Commission’s president, announced in a press conference that the Commission has confirmed dual nationality for two of the 10 cases it has investigated to date. However, Lambert has so far refused to release the names of dual citizenship officials, saying his commission would proceed “impartially” and “without emotion.” He said arrangements have been made to continue the nationality investigations overseas.

The Senate inquiry threatens to create a political crisis which may force President Martelly, his Prime Minister Garry Conille, and other ministers to step down. If the charges against him prove true, it means that candidate Martelly lied to election officials about holding dual citizenship, which current Haitian law explicitly forbids for a high elected official.

Here is more.  There is the small matter of the Haitian constitution:

Commission member Sen. Steven Irvenson Benoît said that Haiti’s 1987 Constitution prohibits any foreign national not only from becoming president or prime minister, but also from acting as a minister or secretary of state. The Constitution’s Article 56 stipulates: “An alien may be expelled from the territory of the Republic if he becomes involved in the political life of the country, or in cases determined by law.“

Michel Martelly (“Sweet Mickey”) spent so much time in the United States, often giving concerts, that for years I simply assumed he held dual citizenship.  Until recently, I had not known about this provision of the Haitian constitution.  What is the old Haitian saying?:

“The constitution is paper, the bayonet is steel.”

Or something like that.

It is not irrational to steadfastly hold the belief that, for example, your dreams have meaning or that the economies of the world are better off communistically despite contradicting evidences. Some men may go through life with the specific avoidance of any material that may contradict their beliefs. After all, when belief is of the nature of habit and the desired end of a mind, mental action on the subject comes to an end. This, argued Pierce, is one method of what he called belief fixation.

Let's distance ourselves from our beliefs for a moment to ponder his logical argument. I posted last time about the individualistic nature of men. My supposition rests though on no facts about the world, as individualism has no empirical merit. It is merely a generally accepted belief that has a wide acceptance as being reasonable. Does that make me right? Not so, to Pierce.

It makes my belief merely akin to a similarity that is comparable to taste. Taste, however, like fashion, comes and goes and no fixed agreement is ever reached. The argument follows then why not remove anything that is human in any matter or in an inquiry? We should aim to rid our beliefs from any human causal influences, continued Pierce. And that would be the scientific method. In more familiar language:

There are real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinions about them; those realities affect our senses according to regular laws, and, though our sensations are as different as our relations to the objects, yet, by taking advantage of the laws of perception, we can ascertain by reasoning how things really are, and any man, if he have sufficient experience and reason enough about it, will be led to the one true conclusion.

Assuming that there are no doubts about the existence of reality, his belief of the scientific method however contradicts his logic. His reasoning is as follows:

Everybody uses the scientific method about a great many things, and only ceases to use it when he does not know how to apply it. 4. Experience of the method has not led me to doubt it, but, on the contrary, scientific investigation has had the most wonderful triumphs in the way of settling opinion.

Has it really? His language of used clearly demonstrates the effects of contagious agreement. Like a taste, "'everybody' has made used of the scientific method" could merely be a fad. The scientific method may have settled a lot of opinions objectively but other methods have too settled matters within an enclave - here, if belief fixation is the primary objective regardless of contradictory evidences.

Should it thus be possible to have a method of testing the method? Or does it even make sense at all to restrict ourselves to a single method that defines our beliefs? Herein is Feyerabend's reductio ad absurdum which calls for the eradication of rules that govern epistemological methods. His laissez-faire approach of discovery liberates un- and learned men to venture with no predetermined processes.

He describes science as being obsess with its own mythology and emits an elitist and racist air to the point of being an oppressive ideology. Albeit, his proposal of anything goes for scientific progress radically shifts from the ordinary man's thinking yet it has been proven to be fundamentally important in shaping our perception of reality.

My supposition of individualism and including Pierce's position on the scientific method rests on no scientific reasoning yet this conclusive method, and others like it, of arriving to a belief provides us with a pluralistic approach at determining the truth. Siding with Feyerabend, we need not abide to a monistic methodological process when determining the truth. But what is the Truth?

To aim at having an appropriate response, I will assume that by individualism you are referring to the meaning of individualism as "the pursuit of individual rather than common or collective interests; egoism."

What strikes me most in your writing is your unquestionable universalities of assumptions that an individual 'doe's not want to feel alone' and that 'one must care about another's life'. How do you know? And to what end? Being alone is relative and is merely an undesirability; an end of itself. Not being alone is based on contingent facts about your surrounding and the world, such as what would make us happy and it has no other motive than the "worthiness of being happy"; logically true as well for sadness. A definition of which that is well in line with the individualistic approach described above. Notwithstanding that it is also an individualistic act to smoke, to go to school, to marry - any act that enables you to pursuit your interests is individualistic. To share one's thoughts and emotions is not a contradictive act of an individualistic individual. In fact, it is egoistical.

Let us switch now to morality since your composition's apparent aim is to dwell on the hypothesis that an individualistic life 'isn't that bad'. Morality to me is subjective. In the modern world, we think of 'good' as meaning an act that is altruistic or just, or in Nietzsche's language 'unegoistic', and 'bad' as describing that which is cruel or unjust.

This, however, was not the original meaning of good and bad. For the early Greeks, the ones of whom Homer spoke, 'good' and 'bad' referred to different types of humanity. The nobility was 'good', as were the dispositions of character necessary to be noble and aristocratic, dispositions such as courage, strength and pride. 'Bad' referred to the 'herd', and to the characteristics of the masses, such as vulgarity, untruthfulness and cowardice.

But it is with Christianity, the distinction between 'good' and 'bad' became transmuted into that between 'good' and 'evil', a distinction primarily not between different kinds of characters or different forms of flourishing, but between divinely sanctioned and divinely forbidden behaviors. Let's take, for example, for some, the epitome of the modern world for altruistic deeds: Mother Teresa. She is an archetypical of an individualistic human. She believed that her divinely sanctioned acts would bring her closer to God and she thus canonized.

Christianity is driven not by a love of the poor and the dispossessed but by a rancorous hatred of nobility and strength. It has transformed us into morality slaves and has given us an external scapegoat of the pain that accompanies one's sense of personal inferiority. In the end, one needs to define what moral laws ought to be. However, no one has come up with an answer. Kant's categorical imperatives come close.

P.S.: To have control is an illusion.

I've been told that Kant, Hegel and Kierkegaard were poor writers whose impenetrable prose style is incidental to their philosophy. I've also been told that their views are so profound as to defy expression in terms comprehensible even to smart, patient, well-educated people who are not specialists in the philosophy of the period. I've heard similar things about Laozi, Heidegger, Plotinus, Derrida. (I won't name any living philosophers.) I don't buy it.

Philosophy is not wordless profound insight. Philosophy is prose. Philosophy happens not in mystical moments, but in the creation of mundane sentences. It happens on the page, in the pen, through the keyboard, in dialogue with students and peers, and to some extent but only secondarily in private inner speech. If what exists on the page is not clear, the philosophy is not clear.

Philosophers, like all specialists, profit from a certain amount of jargon, but philosophy need not become a maze of jargon. If private jargon doesn't regularly touch down in comprehensible public meanings, one has produced not philosophy but merely a fog of words of indeterminate content. There are always gaps, confusions, indeterminacies, hidden assumptions, failures of clarity, even in great philosophical prose stylists like Hume, Nietzsche, and David Lewis. Thus, these philosophers present ample interpretative challenges. But the gaps, confusions, indeterminacies, hidden assumptions, and even to some extent the failures of clarity, are right there on the page, available to anyone who looks conscientiously for them, not shrouded in a general fog.

If a philosopher can convince the public to take him seriously -- or her, but let's say him -- being obfuscatory yields three illegitimate benefits: First, he intimidates the reader and by intimidation takes on a mantle of undeserved intellectual authority. Second, he disempowers potential critics by having a view of such indeterminate form that any criticism can be written off as based on a misinterpretation. Third, he exerts a fascination on the kind of reader who enjoys the puzzle-solving aspect of discovering meaning, thus drawing from that reader a level of attention that may not be merited by the quality of his ideas (though this third benefit may be offset by alienating readers with low tolerance for obfuscatory prose).

These philosophers exhibit a kind of intellectual authoritarianism, with themselves as the assumed authority whose words we must spend time puzzling out. And simultaneously they lack intellectual courage: the courage to make plain claims that could be proven wrong, supported by plain arguments that could be proven fallacious. These three features synergize: If a critic thinks she has finally located a sound criticism, she can be accused of failing to solve the interpretive puzzle of the philosopher's superior genius.

Few philosophers, I suspect, deliberately set out to be obfuscatory. But I am inclined to believe that some are attuned to its advantages as an effect of their prose style and for that reason make little effort to write comprehensibly. Perhaps they find their prose style shaped by audience responses: When they write clearly, they are dismissed or refuted; when they produce a fog of words that hint of profound meaning underneath, they earn praise. Perhaps thus they are themselves to some extent victims -- victims of a subculture, or circle of friends, or intended audience, that regards incomprehensibility as a sign of brilliance and so demands it in their heroes.