I’d have more to say, but need to catch the bus.

Harman:

…there will be an upside and a downside just as with every choice in life. The upside is that you’re likely to take a longer historical perspective and not become bewitched by the transient, chiselling fashions of Leiter-ranked university departments, nor will you be so chipper and facile about hunting for “bad arguments” in authors such as Plato and Leibniz. The downside is that you’ll tend to view great works of philosophy as existing on a plane far above that of normal human Ph.D.’s, and as a result you may become depressed about your own ability to make a real contribution to the field, and thus you may begin to do purely historical work (which certainly has its place, but continental philosophy has often lost all sight of the distinction between historical and systematic work).

Welp, that’s certainly the case for myself. I wish to be as original and ground-breaking as any Plato, etc. but what are the actual chances I am? Pretty slim. Certainly the chances that I hit that target on the first shot, as it were, are almost impossible. I’m just not that good.

“The more one writes, the less one reads – it’s a question of time. But I stress: an authentically philosophical book is distinguishable from a learned book. The latter, loaded with quotes and footnotes, struts its erudition; it flourishes its credentials in the academic milieu, brandishes its armor and its lances before its adversaries. It is a social artifact. How many philosophies are dictated solely by the preoccupation with being invulnerable to to criticism? They present themselves as fortresses, usually sheltering a lobbying support group. In the wide open spaces of fear, only trepidation reigns.

I have come to believe that a work achieves more excellence when it cites fewer proper names. It is naked, defenseless, not lacking knowledge but saturated with secondary naivete; not intent on being right but ardently reachng fortoward new intuitions.

A university thesis aims at the imitable; a plain and simple work seeks the inimitable.”

From Michel Serres and Bruno Latour’s Conversation on Science, Culture, Time, p.22.

This video by Errol Morris is the story of ‘The Umbrella Man’, a conspicuous figure present at the assassination of JFK. It’s  told by the author of one of the many books on the assassination, but Josiah Thompson seems to be a class above the average conspiracy nut. He talks about the process of spotting this man in the film – holding an incongruous black umbrella open on a beautiful sunny day – and after a process of investigation he appealed to the man to come forward and explain himself to the senate committee investigating JFK’s assassination. The explanation was so “wacky” and so bizarrely out-of-left field that one could, quite literally, never invent it – so it must have been true. From this Thompson concluded something very important about the limits of our knowledge of historical events:

“…if you have any fact which you think is really sinister… is really obviously a fact which can only point to some sinister underpinning – hey, forget it man. Because you can never on your own think up all the non-sinister perfectly valid explanations for that fact.”

Which is a fantastic point, and which Thompson calls a “cautionary tale”. If only it were heeded more often.

In response to ‘The Umbrella Man’ John Updike, in a piece for the New Yorker, allegedly came to the following conclusions about history and historical research:

“We wonder whether a genuine mystery is being concealed here or whether any similar scrutiny of a minute section of time and space would yield similar strangenesses—gaps, inconsistencies, warps, and bubbles in the surface of circumstance. Perhaps, as with the elements of matter, investigation passes a threshold of common sense and enters a sub-atomic realm where laws are mocked, where persons have the life-span of beta particles and the transparency of neutrinos, and where a rough kind of averaging out must substitute for absolute truth.”

Go watch the video – it’s only 6 minutes long, and well worth watching if only for how bizarrely tangential the Umbrella Man’s reasons are.

So Jenn Frank wrote an astonishingly great piece ‘On games of chance, cheating, and religion’ and JP Grant added some thoughts of his own about the notion of ‘fairness’ in games, in an equally excellent response, ‘Fair Play’. Go read both of them now if you haven’t yet.

But I wanted to add a little something about the notion of determinism, the spectre of which Jenn mentioned in relation to things like the location of gold veins, being able to win at jeopardy or the scratch lottery, the notion of a ‘solved game‘, and the Christian theological tradition following Calvin.

In essence, if anything is ‘solved’ or ‘fated’ or ‘pre-destined’ what we’re saying is that it is determined in advance, usually by some set of rules which may or may not be discoverable. That’s kind of fine – there are some things which can always be determined in advance, like 8 plus 9 or that a (non-contradictory) square will always have four sides, but all these things only happen in the realm of ideas, as abstractions, or in artificially (arbitrarily?) closed systems. Determinism as a philosophy, ideology or religious doctrine concerns the nature of everything. Whether it’s Calvinism, Newtonian physics, belief in the Roman god Fortuna, or a new age sense of fate, they’re really all saying much the same thing – that everything is predestined, predetermined. Why? Because if any part of the universe is ‘out of control’ for whichever force does the determining (even the laws of physics) then the whole thing becomes irredeemable corrupted. One atom left beyond the powerful reach of our Calvinist God’s control could – no, would – undermine the whole basis of determinism. Even if this Calvinist deity is omnipotent and knows what this ‘out of control’ (hello free will) atom will do, the deity reduces the real agency of the free atom utterly and we’re now splitting semantic hairs over our definition of determinism (“If I have ‘free will’ but nothing I do could possibly ever change anything from it’s set course… how is that free again?”). And if it’s left up to “chance”… well, who’s omnipotent now? The point about a philosophy of a determinist universe is that it is so utterly totalising – it’s all or nothing, otherwise it’s not determinism.

But maybe you’re not convinced – after all, how do we know that it’s not deterministic? Well here’s where it get a bit tricky, because we really come to this question with a lot of baggage. Like Jenn says, we worry about the answers to these kinds of questions, and that makes us want to stay away from them, or at least makes us anxious about asking them. It’s also difficult because we’re already treading on the toes of philosophers, who all come with their own historically specific baggage, which in turn is already affecting how we’re even talking about this issue right now…

So if we’ve got all this baggage, where do we start? One way is to start by pinching the best idea that Science ever had, which is to say that we begin from a position of utter, naïve openness to revision – no problem is ever permanently closed to inquiry; no question is beyond asking; no contrary evidence is ever ignored for the sake of preserving our current (even working!) answers. This kind of attitude has actually gotten a bit of a bad rap lately because it’s been perverted and selectively deployed to spectacular effect by people with an agenda other than inquiry-for-inquiry’s-sake. As an aside, in Australia in 2007 over half the population polled in the affirmative when asked whether or not they believed in human influenced climate change. Since then that number has plummeted as tabloid media and right-wingers colluded together to cast unreasonable doubt on issue. We used to believe, but now it’s “not a settled science” once more. That’s not what I’m talking about – these people are no more presenting real challenges to climate science than Ron Paul is really going to take a libertarian position on women’s reproductive rights.

But back to the issue of determinism. What are the odds that the universe is deterministic? Okay, odds is a not a good way to phrase it. How about, ‘What are the possibilities with respect to whether or not the universe is deterministic?’ That’s a much better frame for the question, because now we can see that, actually there’s only two options – either it is, or it isn’t.

Well, actually we’ve already seen a bit of a third option, and that is that derminism is ‘unevenly distributed’ around the cosmos, or occasionally pops up in localised regions of time or space. But as we said at the outset, that’s not determinism – it’s all or nothing baby! Either there’s an actual, real chance that an atomic spec influences the fate of the rest of the cosmos, or there’s not. Implicit within our culturally-overburdened notion of ‘determinism’ is the assumption that all of the universe is consistently deterministic, otherwise… it’s not really determinism! Ta da! So we’re back to two options. The universe and everything in it is either deterministic or it isn’t.

From here we can go in a number of directions – perhaps we can draw on some fancy modern science and apply what we know about popular theories in advanced theoretical physics like string theory, ‘M-theory’ and other quantum mechanical frameworks. Or alternatively we could take the Pratchette-esque route and say that it’s ‘turtles all the way down’, and that rather than having a ‘bottom’, the universe just… keeps on going, all the way down, down, down into the depths of Hades and beyond. It’s hard to imagine such a thing, but it’s really quite difficult to say that it’s beyond the realm of plausibility. Still, it’s just as hard to imagine that this never-ending, fractal-esque universe behaved in anything resembling a determinist manner. Part of the appeal of determinism stems from it’s finitude, in the sense that something starts a chain that is predictable and utterly determined from the very outset.

So whether the universe contains an infinite regress of ‘things’ of increasingly ultra-tiny bits of stuff also impacts our assessment of the question of a determinist universe. If the very bottom level (let’s just say it’s quantum strings) is all irreducibly small and made of the same ‘stuff’ then how that ‘stuff’ behaves makes a difference to the nature of the universe. In fact, all the universe is is that stuff, and if that ‘stuff’ really is strings current thinking (as I understand) is that rather than being deterministic, stings are so weird that they behave based on probability. So whether or not you get out of bed and brush your teeth in the morning is underpinned by strange stringy bits with 26 dimensions all behaving in a probabilistic manner… and by that stage we’re not living in a determinist universe.

But before we go home with our new found suspicion that we’re probably (ah! ahahahahaha!) not living in a determinist universe, we should make one small detour back up to the realm of medium sized-object and remind ourselves where a limited kind of determinism does exist – and that is in abstractions, ideas and in arbitrariness.

And this is where we come back to games, because most games are exactly that – abstractions, rules, ideas, and arbitrariness incarnate. In their ‘pure’ (think platonic) form, every game probably could be deterministic, but games don’t exist as pure thought or rules because games are done, or they are played. Where are they played? In the universe. What is the universe? Probably not deterministic. And despite our best efforts, our lucky or careful organisation, there really is no predicting when the indeterminacy of the universe will intrude. Even these machines – these localised realms of determinacy we call ‘computers’ – depend on other things like the continued operation of the laws of electro-conductance, as well as on the manufacturing standards at Xbox HQ. And while it might even look as though certain ‘universal laws’ like electron conductivity are themselves ‘deterministic’ from the point of view of an engineer or software developer, we would do well to remember that these laws themselves are contingent. That is, at a certain point in the far, far, far, far distant future, at the end of the universe even, according to physicists these laws are going to themselves break down. If they’re  right then the universe will eventually have expanded enough to rip apart even atoms themselves. Try running your Xbox in that kind of an environment.

But hey, these predictions could be wrong – remember we’re not allowing ourselves the option of shutting down necessary revisions early. But at the same time, that’s also kind of appropriate. If we do live in a probabilistic universe, we may never really, truly and necessarily be able to prove it. That’s makes sense, I think, and it seems like a beautiful kind of symmetry, wouldn’t you say?

Source.

The first, from Graham Harman’s ‘Circus Philosophicus’, from the final chapter ‘The Sleeping Zebra’, pp.65-66:

“Latour was in a listening mood, and politely allowed me to expound on the recent mutation of the critic into the full-fledged troll: that despicable stock character of the unmonitored salt flats of the internet. My thesis was that the troll is the new successor to past figures of anti-philosophy: the sophist, the pedant, and the Inquisitor, among others. I argued that the troll is the degenerate form of the critic, untethered from any commitment of his own, and unleashed on the world to doubt and critique whatever one might doubt and critique rather than what truly deserves refutation.”

And the second, remarkably close to Harman et al.’s project in OOO and Speculative Realism, is the following quote from the introduction to Matt Taibbi’s ‘The Great Derangement’, pp.12:

“When a people can no longer agree even on the basic objective facts of their political existence, the equation changes; real decisions, even in the approximate direction of righteousness, eventually become impossible.”

Those following along on twitter and Facebook will probably already be aware of the ongoing saga of my somewhat hobbled laptop. For the rest of you, about a month or so ago now my Laptop started malfunctioning, with the likely culprit (or so I thought at the time) some faulty screen part, as the screen was still operational but without the backlight coming on it was nearly impossible to see.

I took it apart, this being my second Toshiba laptop I’ve disassembled, and it was much like the first, but I’d forgotten enough that when confounded sufficiently enough I thought to search for an online guide. And what do you know, there’s a disassembly guide for just about every Toshiba laptop out there. Here’s mine, incidentally. We’ll come back to that in a minute, but suffice to say there didn’t seem to be any loose wires or shonky connections that I could find easily causing the screen to go dark, leaving the rest of the PC running normally.

So I considered alternatives. I thought about going down the apple fanatic route and buying a wireless keyboard for my iPad, or even just adjusting to typing on a glass-screen but I tried the latter for a while and it was less than satisfactory. I also heard reports from people who’d tried the keyboard+iPad technique – in particular Simon Ferrari – but he was emphatic that it was not an ideal solution. I could see his point – switching between apps is a nuisance on the iPad and in terms of formatting or looking up citations you can add that to something that can’t really be done without investing in some rather expensive apps.

So I started hunting for a new laptop. I considered buying a cheap replacement, also contemplated taking an old laptop of my parents’ when they bought a new one (though they were pretty uncertain about whether this would actually happen or not), and finally, earlier this week I asked my housemate if I could try taking apart and fixing his also broken (Toshiba) laptop which had stopped receiving power a few months previous.

So I started disassembling it (following another guide from the same site) and the process struck me as, again, remarkably similar to taking apart my own laptop, despite the fact that they were entirely different models bought 12-18 months apart. The process was so similar that by the end of it I started to feel like I knew the design methodology of Toshiba laptops, or their “best practice” or something – and I guess maybe I do.

It’s kind of like reverse engineering. In a roundabout way I’m getting a feel for how these machines are put together, but in reverse: each time you start with the keyboard bezel – this little strip of plastic with clips that sits over the keyboard looking snug and neat, hiding away the screws that anchor the keyboard in place. It’s a pretty smooth trick though, and the bezel looks and feels solidly attached. Once the keyboard is unscrewed, it can be lifted up and out of the rest of the case, with a springy connector cable attaching the keyboard to the motherboard, held fast by a neat little lock.

There’s a dozen or so screws on the underside that keep the top half of the case attached to the bottom, so we need to flip over and remove them all. But once those are all out (and there is a lot of them) there’s more of those neat little (serial?) cables connecting to the motherboard – one from the touchpad and another from the strip of buttons – the power button, mute button, etc, etc – which all need to be unlocked similar to the keyboard before they can be detached.

So we can get the top off, but the screen is still attached. Underneath some rubber stoppers are about four screws and once they’re off the plastic casing has more of the bezel-type clips that just pop out with a bit of force. It can be disconcertingly difficult the first time, and I worried about breaking the plastic on a number of occasions while disassembling, but the plastic seems to have quite a bit of bend and warp in it before breaking, it’s pretty remarkable stuff but I imagine not very biodegradable.

I did have a point here somewhere that was larger than just a description of how to take apart a Toshiba laptop. But I guess that’s it – you can adapt these set of steps to disassemble any Toshiba laptop (or so I’ve found) and that reflects something of that company’s design or manufacturing process. Or perhaps there’s a connection to be unveiled between ideal laptop design or expectation and these particular arrangement of technical objects. The screen includes hinges, cables, lighting tubes, power cables and DC to AC power converters; motherboards consist of screws, solder, laser etched rows of circuitry, Intel designed and manufactured CPUs with 45 nanometre transistors, capacitors made somewhere in South-East Asia, power coils assembled and wound by machines on a factory floor; cases moulded from the compacted remains of billion year long extinct plants and animals…

It’s an amazing arrangement of objects, and breaking one of them open to see what’s inside is quite the eye-opening exercise. I have more to say about things like this now that my favoured writing implement (this laptop) is back in action. I’ve been reading Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern and I plan to summarise my thoughts on it soon, and I’ve also been meaning to re-visit my post ‘Rhetorical Questions’ from roughly a year ago which I feel really needs updating. I remember being extremely proud of it at the time, but a year on it feels… anachronistic. It feels like I was writing against something that never eventuated, or perhaps I wasn’t writing against one thing specifically at all. We’ll see soon enough.

‘About Twitter Limits (Update, API, DM and Following)‘ by Twitter Support.

The current technical limits for accounts are:

• Direct Messages: 250 per day.
• Updates: 1,000 per day. The daily update limit is further broken down into smaller limits for semi-hourly intervals. Retweets are counted as updates.
• Changes to Account Email: 4 per hour.
• Following (daily): Please note that this is a technical account limit only, and there are additional rules prohibiting aggressive following behavior. You can find detailed page describing following limits and prohibited behavior on the Follow Limits and Best Practices Page. The technical follow limit is 1,000 per day.
• Following (account-based): Once an account is following 2,000 other users, additional follow attempts are limited by account-specific ratios. The Follow Limits and Best Practices Page has more information.

‘No one cares about property damage‘ by Voyou Desoeuvre at Voyou.org

…the liberal position is based around a belief that we can control how we are perceived, and how the state (and its ideological apparatuses like the media) will respond to us. Or actually this could be put more strongly: the criticism reveals the liberal’s desperate need to be in control. The fact that protestors have very limited ability to prevent state crackdowns, and certainly individual protestors can do almost nothing, is scary, and it conflicts with deeply held liberal beliefs about how the state works, and how protesting can change it.

‘Deep Intellect‘ by Sy Montgomery at Origin Magazine.

“Octopuses,” writes philosopher Godfrey-Smith, “are a separate experiment in the evolution of the mind.”

‘A woman’s opinion is the min-skirt of the internet‘ by Laurie Penny at The Independent.co.uk.

An opinion, it seems, is the short skirt of the internet. Having one and flaunting it is somehow asking an amorphous mass of almost-entirely male keyboard-bashers to tell you how they’d like to rape, kill and urinate on you. This week, after a particularly ugly slew of threats, I decided to make just a few of those messages public on Twitter, and the response I received was overwhelming. Many could not believe the hate I received, and many more began to share their own stories of harassment, intimidation and abuse.

…

The implication that a woman must be sexually appealing to be taken seriously as a thinker did not start with the internet: it’s a charge that has been used to shame and dismiss women’s ideas since long before Mary Wollestonecraft was called “a hyena in petticoats”. The internet, however, makes it easier for boys in lonely bedrooms to become bullies.

‘You and your entire family are full of shit. You’re welcome.‘ by Jonathan McCalmont at Ruthless Culture.

While the internet does feature a lot of bullying and ‘calling people out’, the real mechanics of the blogosphere are those of the social world. If you start doing things that alienate you from the group, chances are that people will not tell you that you are acting strangely, they will simply start ignoring you. In other words, they will exclude you from discussion until you get fed up and go away. As someone who struggles with these sorts of group-dynamics in real life, I admire the internet’s potential for freeing us from passive-aggressive exclusion techniques and so I admire Bbot’s decision to tell a number of bloggers that he simply cannot continue to read them. His explanations as to why he has ditched some of his subscriptions are fascinating as they show how a genuine desire to engage with what another person has to say has lead only to frustration, boredom and annoyance

…

There are times when telling someone that they are wrong, deluded and completely full of shit is the most supportive and generous thing that you can do and the relative anonymity of the internet should free us from the rules of passive-aggressive social interaction that make this sort of honesty so difficult to implement. So next time someone calls you out on the internet, say thank you because having them ignore you until you go away is so much worse.

On Wednesday the 9th of November I presented a paper to the Knowledge/Culture/Social Change International Conference at UWS Parramatta. The title of my paper was “Neuroscience, Technospectacularism and the Mind” and I recorded my talk which you can listen to below. The 29 minute recording includes some questions asked by the audience at the end – the first from Greg Haigne Associate Professor in the School of Languages & Comparitive Cultural Studies at UQ (Who presented a very interesting paper the day previously), and one from Professor Penny Harvey from the University of Manchester)

Direct download.

The phrase “Technospectacularism” is an adapted version of a phrase from the opening pages of Ian Bogost’s How To Do Things With Videogames and I think it’s an incredibly apt phrase to describe our time. The thesis of the paper itself is a reaction to what I see as an upswing in the use of Neuroscientific findings as a blunt weapon of persuasion for academics, journalists and authors outside of – or on the periphery of – the field itself. To counter this dangerous misuse of the unfinished science of the brain I drew on William Uttal’s critically important work suggesting that the brain-mind problem may be intractable. From there I spun out a hypothesis based on the “external mind” thesis, by Andy Clark and David Chalmers, as well as Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Philosophy, suggesting that the mind is a real object with just as much reality as the touchable stuff of the brain, despite being made up of  different “stuff” to the brain alone.

I’m very interested to hear your comments or concerns, and will certainly entertain requests for clarification – my email address is on the sidebar.

“…actor-networks, unit operations, alien phenomenology, agentic drift, onticology, guerrilla metaphysics, carnal phenomenology, ontography, agential realism, cosmopolitics, panpsychism, insect media, posthumanism, flat ontology, dark vitalism, prosthetics, territorial assemblage, vibrant materialism, dorsality, distributed intelligence, dark ecology, hyperobjects, realist magic, post-continuity, and other paradigms…”

From O-Zone a new journal about Object-Oriented Studies.

The expressive, persuasive power of lists is well known to the practitioners of OOO/SR so it should come as no surprise to see the list of approaches and paradigms applicable to O-Zone presented in such a list. But Philosophy as an object itself? If we buy into OOO/SR then yes, nothing can avoid the steamroller crush of Being An Object, I suppose.

But there’s something weird here…  how does a philosophy/ideology/methodology/etc  maintain object status and still operate like we expect philosophy to? It can’t make any claims to being “meta” and above the realm of cheese and mice and vineyards, and so the OOO “object” should (ideally) behave according to it’s own rules for objects. I guess the practitioners are aware of this, given that they’ve mentioned on a number of occasions that SR/OOO owes a lot to other “things” like the internet. So not so much of a problem after all, I guess, just something to always remember…