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pazodetrasalba · 11 months

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Tweeting

Dear Caroline:

A couple of days ago I wrote a twitter thread on your blog's appeal (and indirectly, about yours). As I suspect you have for good reasons avoided that public arena, I am going to share them with you here:

Controversial take: I found @carolinecapital's old tumblr and its related works the *best* Hypertext fiction I've ever read. Come to think of it, it was also the most fascinating faction (creative non-fiction). 🧵👇

If, like most people, you haven't studied Literary Theory at uni, you might be wondering what 'Hypertext fiction' actually is. Putting it plainly, it's just a fancy, academic, hyped-up version of your old 'Choose your Own Adventure' gamebook with a high-literature veneer. When you marry this with poststructuralist theory about the reader as co-constructor of texts and with the hyperlinks which connect the WWW, you get a proposal for a type of open-ended fiction, a bit like Borges' The Garden of Forking Paths. These works were theorized by George Landow, Jay David Boulter, Espen Aarseth and many others, and exemplified by texts like Michael Joyce's "afternoon, a story" or Shelley Jackson's "Patchwork Girl". Today they are a bit passé, and you can find a Wired article explaining why.

Moving on to Caroline's blog: in it you find, in little snapshots like the letters of an epistolary novel, glimpses and pieces of the puzzle of a real-life character that is so incredible and fascinating you couldn't have invented her and have any claim to verisimilitude: as Mark Twain put it, 'Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn't'. 'Caroline as such', like any of us, is noumenically inaccessible. At the same time, she is a real person with a real biography that can be reconstructed from her blog and many other multimedia texts: newspapers (online and offline), wikipedia entries, news reports, written and oral memories, blog and forum posts, all forming an intricate web of (sometimes contradicting) stories from different hands.

For those of you living under a rock, Caroline Ellison is an extremely smart and young woman, a math and economics genius who shortly after graduating from Stanford got involved in the cryptocurrency business and became an accessory of @SBF_FTX's alleged criminal affairs. Like any 4-line summary, though, the previous lines are extremely reductionistic, and her blog allows one to see the many and complex facets of Caroline's personality through 7 years of entries: some are naïve, some bizarre, many wise and illuminating, all of them interesting.

Because of the scandal and predictable cherry-pickings of the yellow press, the weirdest stuff is what has been circulated and caught the public's imagination: Caroline's interest in contrarian and unusual stuff like polyamory, female traditionalism, human biodiversity as well as some more 'conventional' bad things like unbridled ambition and substance abuse. And yet that constitutes less than 10% of her musings! Most of what you'll find are the very intelligent, funny and nerdy ramblings of an insecure and curious young woman. A lot of her entries, for example, are about Utilitarianism and Effective Altruism (a movement that defends using science and reason to fight poverty and promote effective charities and action in frequently overlooked and neglected areas). You get the feeling that she is a deeply moral person whose only interest in money is the way she can use it for doing the most good. It is difficult to doubt her sincerity and her commitment in their implementation (which included donating at least 10% of her earnings to these causes).

The best of classical tragedy is about wise and good people who either get corrupted and/or are led to their doom because of circumstances beyond their control. It feels like Caroline's story would be good material for a modern take of "a noble mind is here o'erthrown". And overthrown it was. Last December, Caroline pleaded guilty to several charges of fraud as a result of her actions as CEO of Alameda research and under the instructions of @SBF_FTX. She is currently a witness for the coming FTX trial, and will be sentenced thereafter.

In the following months and years, more pieces of information will come to light and perhaps fill the pieces of the puzzle of her fall. Enough are available for speculation, and include the usual culprits: hubris, youth, misdirected ambition, 'fake it till you make it', inexperience, an agreeable and influenceable personality (all the more so as her former boss was also her former lover) and the eternal stumbling-stone of the smart and idealistic: "normal rules aren't meant to apply to us, and we are working for the Greater Good".

Caroline is a complex and interesting personality, and in spite of her misdeeds, I feel she is also ultimately good and moral. She might have gotten lost in the way, and her actions have caused an enormous damage which a consequentialist like her will find hard to bear, but I anticipate she will come out of all this as a better (if less agentic, and perhaps unhappier) person. Hope springs eternal in the human breast, and I am pretty sure she will do her best to heal the wounds done and suffered, and wish her the best luck.

#caroline ellison #twitter

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togglesbloggle · 4 years

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So, @argumate is up to some more prosocial atheistic trolling. As is usual with such things, the conversation isn’t particularly elevated, but it does make me nostalgic for the old bbc days. So I thought I’d be the Discourse I’d like to see in the world. This is the post that kicked things off; correctly noting Platonism as a philosophical foundation underpinning most versions of Abrahamic faiths. And it’s probably the most useful place for me to target also, since hardly anybody just identifies as a Platonist but most westerners are one. So, without further ado, a halfhearted and full-length defense of Platonism:

Well, strike that. A little bit of ado.

I’m not a Platonist myself, so this is a devil’s advocate type of thing. Or maybe you could call it an intellectual Turing test? As I discuss here, my philosophical commitments are mostly to skepticism, and for instrumental reasons, to reductionist materialism. That combo leaves me some wiggle room, and I find it fairly easy to provisionally occupy a religious mindset, so I can generally read and enjoy religious polemics. I also have a fairly deep roster of what are often called ‘spiritual experiences’; I’m probably in the set of people that are by nature predisposed to religion. I am not religious, and I approve of Argumate saying things like ‘God is not real’ a lot. This is in no way a retread of the arguments in The Republic or Plato’s other writings; you can go read those if you want, but I’m going to play around with stuff that I think is better suited to this audience.

Attention conservation notice: yikes. This got pretty long.

Anyway, on to the argument. Argumate’s main point is pretty clear, I think: ‘forms’ in the Greek sense are a function and product of the perceiving mind. Birds don’t conform to bird-ness; instead brains naturally produce a sort of bird-ness category to make processing the world easier, and to turn a series of wiggly and continuous phenomena into a discrete number of well-modeled objects. Basically, we impose ‘thing-ness’ on the wavefunction of reality. And there are some good reasons to think that it might be true! Our understanding of categories gets a lot sharper when reality conveniently segregates itself, and whenever that boundary gets a little blurry, our ability to use categories tends to break down. If the recognition of animal-ness came from contact with a higher plane of reality, you wouldn’t necessarily expect people to get confused about sponges.

But. While there’s certainly plenty of support for Argumate’s position, it doesn’t strike me as anything near self-evident, or necessarily true. So what I’ll argue is that Platonism isn’t obviously false, and that if we ever converge on a true answer to the question of our reality, then that truth could plausibly be recognizably Platonist. My opening salvo here is, predictably enough, mathematics.

‘Mathematical Platonism’ is a whole other thing, only distantly related to Classical Platonism, and I only really mean to talk about the latter. But nonetheless, mathematics really actually does appear to be a situation where we can simply sit in a chair, think deeply, and then more or less directly perceive truths. Basic arithmetic can be independently discovered, and usefully applied, by almost anybody; ‘quantity’ comes naturally to most humans, and the inviolable laws of quantity are exploited just as often. It’s also very hard to argue that these are ‘mere’ linguistic conventions, since fundamental natural behaviors like the conservation of mass depend on a kind of consistent logical framework. In most chemical reactions, the number of atomic nuclei does not change, and the atoms added to a new molecule are perfectly mirrored by the loss of atoms in some reactant; this remains true in times and places where no thinking mind exists to count them.

There are a lot of debates about what math is, fundamentally. But inevitably when we study math, we’re studying the set of things that must be true, given some premise: we’re asking whether some proposition is a necessary consequence of our axioms. The so-called ‘unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics’ suggests that the phenomena that Argumate mentions- hotdogs and birds and whatnot- are observed only within the auspices of a sort of super-phenomenon. Loosely speaking, we can call this super-phenomenon self-consistency.

We treat phenomena as having a natural cause. Platonism, at its crunchy intellectually rewarding center, represents a willingness to bite the bullet and say that self-consistency also has a cause. Plato himself actually provided what might be the most elegant possible answer! Basically, posit the simplest thing that meets the criterion of being A) autocausal and B) omnicausal, and then allow the self-consistency of the cosmos to follow from its dependence on (in Platonist terms, its emanation from) that single, unitary cause. The universe is self-consistent for the very straightforward reason that there’s only one thing. Any plurality, to the extent that plurality is even a thing, happens because ‘the only real thing’ is only partially expressed in a particular phenomenon. To skip ahead to Lewis’ Christian interpretation of all this, you’d say that humans and moons and hotdogs are distinguished from God not by what they have, but by what they lack.

And for present purposes, I do want to take a step back and point out that this does feel like a reasonable answer to a very important question. Materialism fundamentally has no answer to the question of self-consistency and/or the presence of logic and order, and that is (for me) one of its least satisfying limits. We’ve got things like ‘the origin of the universe’, sure. But we probe the Big Bang with mathematical models! That’s a hell of an assumption- namely, that even at the origin of our universe, self-consistency applies. It’s not like materialism has a bad explanation. It just remains silent, treats the problem as outside the domain. If we’re adopting the thing for utilitarian reasons, that’s fine. But if we’re treating materialism as a more comprehensive philosophy, a possible approach to the bigger questions, then it’s a painful absence. In that domain, far from being self-evidently true (in comparison to Platonism), materialism doesn’t even toss its hat in the ring!

Which, uh, gets us to the stuff about Forms and shadows in Plato’s Cave and all that- the intermediate form of existence between the omnisimple core of Platonism and the often chaotic and very plural experience of day-to-day life. And frankly, we’re not especially bound to say that the forms are exactly as Plato described them, any more than atomism is restricted to Democritus. Whether there is some ‘bird-ness’ that is supra- to all extant birds might be contestable; however, it’s easier to wonder whether ‘binary tree’ is supra- to speciation and the real pattern of differences between organisms that we map using Linnaean taxonomy.

But, this is an attempted defense of Platonism and not Toggle’s Version of Platonism that He Invented Because it’s Easier, so I’ll give it a try. Fair warning to the reader, what follows is not fully endorsed (even in the context of a devil’s advocate-type essay), except the broader claim that it’s not self-evidently false. And on the givens we came up with a couple paragraphs ago, this is a reasonable way to tackle what necessarily follows. So let me see how far I can defend a very strong claim: in a self-consistent (or: mathematical) cosmos, beauty cannot be arbitrary.

Remember that Plato never argued that his Forms were arbitrary, or even fully discrete as such; their apparent plurality, like our own, emanates from the unitary Thing What Exists. And so, bird-ness is treated as a contingent thing, not an absolute. It’s just not contingent on human experience. And so for us to believe in ‘bird-ness’ is to believe that there exists some specific and necessary pattern- a Form- which any given material bird must express.

Let’s take an obvious example: any flying bird will, for fairly simple aerodynamic reasons, tend to be symmetrical. Usually, this means two wings. In theory, you could… have one in the middle? Maybe? Even that seems rather goofy to try to imagine, but you could probably get away with it if you were extremely creative biologically. And if we see a bird with only one wing (without a prosthetic or other form of accommodation), then we will tend quite naturally to recognize that something awful is in the process of happening.

A fully materialist explanation of our reaction here would say: we think of the one-winged bird as problematic because A) we have been socialized to recognize and appreciate two-winged birds, and spurn deviations from that socialization, or maybe B) because natural selection has given us a set of instincts that recognize when a body plan has failed in the past, so things like ‘being crippled’ or ‘being sick’ are recognizable.

Platonism, I think, would offer a third option, that C) we recognize (as emanations of The Real Thing) that a one-winged bird body is insufficiently reflective of The Real Thing, and that accordingly it lacks the ability to keep existing. Plato had some… basically magical ideas, about how Forms are recognized, but here I’ll point out that ‘deduction’ is a completely serviceable kind of magic for our purposes. It is, after all, our direct experience of the self-consistency of the cosmos, which follows from the fact that we are ourselves an expression of that same self-consistency; it meets the criteria.

Materialists, obviously, would agree that deductive reasoning could allow a person to recognize the problems inherent in a one-winged bird, but as I said a few paragraphs up, their(/our) explanation of this process is rootless. “Yes, logic and a few high-confidence assumptions let you assume that a bird with only one wing is in trouble,” they might say. And we might ask- “what makes you so sure?” And then the materialist must respond, “Well, let me be more clear. It always worked in the past, and my Bayesian priors are strongly in the direction of the method continuing to bear fruit.” True enough, but it’s not an explanation and doesn’t pretend to be. The universe just does this weird thing for some reason; it works ‘by magic’. So why not call it that? Theurgy for all!

So, consider. We recognize (deductively, let’s say for the sake of argument) that a one-winged bird is on the road to becoming nonexistent, absent some change in circumstances. It may keep going for a little while, but it’s not in homeostasis. And if we reasonably admit this very basic duality to our thinking- things which can persist, and things which cannot- then we start to recognize a sort of analogy between physical phenomena and mathematical propositions. A lemma can be right or wrong, albeit sometimes unprovably so. Basically, it can follow- or not- from the axioms we’re working with. And in a softer but very real sense, that one-winged body plan is wrong analogously to the lemma’s wrongness. Not ‘wrong’ as in ‘counter to cultural norms’, but ‘wrong’ as in ‘unstable given the premises, given the Thing That Exists Most’. Look up research on fitness landscapes, if you’re so inclined- actual biological research isn’t totally unacquainted with the notion. There exists a surprisingly discrete ideal or set of ideals, both for flying birds as a whole and subordinately for any given flying bird species. And we have discovered this using magic.

Insofar as beauty is something to be admired, or pursued, or is otherwise desirable, then our sense of beauty must necessarily correlate with those abstract, and dare I say supra-real, qualities which allow things to persist, and which can therefore be understood deductively. And that set of qualities does, effectively, meet the Platonic criterion of a ‘form’.

The immediate materialist objection is: hey, wait a minute. The supposed ‘objective’ criterion of a bird is contingent, not absolute! It follows from the strength of gravity, the thickness of the atmosphere, the availability of food sources, and on and on. This is one of the most important reasons why genetic drift and speciation happens in the first place, because the ‘ideal’ bird depends on an environment that’s in constant flux.

True enough. But! How do you think the atmosphere got there? It’s an old trick in religious discourse, but in this case I think a valid one. The rightness of the bird depends on the atmosphere, the rightness of the atmosphere depends on the planet, the rightness of the planet depends on the solar system, and ultimately it all depends on that necessary self-consistency which (we proclaim) implies our unitary Most Real Thing. This does mean that we can’t really think of Platonic forms as wholly discrete objects, unconnected to one another and without internal relation among themselves- unfortunately, that’s part of the original Plato that I don’t see as defensible, even with maximum charity. But there’s such a thing as a ‘ring species’, and if we admit Platonic Forms of that type, a kind of dense network of paths being traced through higher-dimensional spaces that correspond to the shadow of That Than Which There Is No Whicher, then it’s more than salvageable. It’s both satisfying to imagine and, I think, quite consistent with the spirit of the original philosophy.

One thing this doesn’t mean. Even if we were to accept all of this, we aren’t obliged to resign ourselves to the lot of that one-winged bird. Indeed, if anything this gives us a rich language by which to justify a prosthetic wing or other form of accommodation: we can talk about ‘making the bird whole’, and can see how our compassion for that bird might lead us to create the conditions of homeostasis once again. But it does mean that if we take a position on the merits of existence- if we’re in favor- then we don’t treat a one- and two-winged bird as coequal scenarios.

Anyway, this has gone on hideously long already for what’s basically an intellectual exercise, so I won’t dive into immortal souls or any of the other ancillaries. I mostly want to reiterate that, far from being obviously false, I do think that (some forms of) Platonism are quite defensible, and can provide coherent answers to questions that I A) care about very deeply and B) can’t resolve to my own satisfaction. Of course, it is not obviously nor trivially true, either. But one can be Platonist without being willfully wrong.

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loststargrazer-blog · 3 years

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Can You Smell Infinity?

Astrophysicists have been trying to find out how big the universe is and their inconclusive measurements suggest it could even be infinite. What does philosophy make of that? In order to do certain mathematics, like Sir Isaac Newton's calculus, you can use certain concepts like infinity (the amount without limit) and the infinitesimal which is what you get when you divide something down infinitely. These concepts, or I shall call it a 'conception' (as a technical term) of infinite, has not been mainstream for that long, only really from Newton onwards. Aristotle said whatever could be described using non-finite concepts could also be described using finite concepts; so Aristotle was what is called a 'finitist', and a very influential one until Newton. In blog 11, "What Makes Us for Real?", we discussed whether certain things exist, and we decided that mathematics was a part of the hyper real: What then of the infinite?

The infinite cannot literally exist in the hyper real as you would need infinite storage to store the items, and we live in a finite and digital mind space here on earth. So there must be a massive sphere confusion (see blog 1) somewhere in mathematics as many mathematicians believe in the everyday infinite. We shall discuss why non-finitists believe in the absoluteness of the infinite, and then we will discuss what the infinite is as a conception of the number line and follow on to a more sensible conclusion compatible with the hyper real experience.

It is true that the infinite conception works in mathematics to solve equations. The simplest form of this I can think of is the sum of a geometric progression. This takes a series, and if the series is declining geometrically, will come to a finite value after infinite terms; for example:

1/1 + 1/2 + 1/4 +1/8 + 1/16 ... 1/∞ = 2

Here the first term is the coefficient a=1, and progression is multiplied by the common ratio r=1/2, and the series is summed to infinite terms. Where r<1, this can be proved using algebra to give the formula:

a/(1 - r)

or 1/(1/2) = 2 in our case.

So to conclude this paragraph, there is something that works about infinity that needs to be explained; perhaps how does it work finitely?

In previous blogs (particularly blog 8 on reductionist science), I have mentioned that even in STEM subjects there can be heavy sphere confusion. Here the idea of infinite, like eternal, or all powerful has been absorbed into and from monotheism, and it is probably a nonsense. Even medieval Christian philosophers had a conception of god's eternal property to be outside of time entirely and not infinite. So the familiarity of infinite or eternal cannot hide the possibility that it is an example of a religious theoretical entity, like those in the last blog 18. This infinite likely cannot exist, so not only is it superfluous, but it contradicts the way we can count space & time so can be rejected.

This notion of eternal outside of time is also probably nonsense, but does make two suggestions: The first trivial one is to reject eternal as everything happens in finite time, for time is just a function of change. The second more important one for us is that 'infinite' the conception is not infinite, being a conception. So the infinite is not infinite as many had confused religion with metaphysics, metaphysics with a mental conception, and a conception with a placeholder in an equation. So what then is a hyper real conception that acts as both a placeholder and a concept?

Before we begin on conceptions, we should look a little more broadly at the issues conceptions need to cover. Can impossible things work in mathematics? Yes they do seem to be able to. We have the infinite series, the infinitesimal calculus, and there are others. A simple example of something impossible is the imaginary number i, which is defined as the square root of minus 1, or (√-1). No number multiplied by itself equals -1; yet using i you can solve real world problems of engineering and even some simple algebra:

Suppose you have two lots of partition walls for two square boxes that will reduce the clutter in your bedroom, one by -4m2 of clutter and the other by -9m2 of clutter; and you wanted to make the boxes equal sized rectangles using the existing pieces; how much clutter would they store?

√(-4m2) x √(-9m2) = 2im x 3im = 6i2m2 = -6m2 as i2 = -1

so 2 boxes x -6m2 = -12m2 of clutter. This is not better than -4m2 -9m2 = -13m2 of clutter before, but at least you know that the cost of making them equal and rectangular is +1m2 of extra clutter in your bedroom.

So conceptions such as i, need not be infinite, and can sometimes be used in mathematics, also they are not really existing.

If a conception is not the real thing, then we can treat it as a name for a thing; so implicitly a name is a new type of set as first described in blog 6 on causation. This conception though is more than a normal name; by normal I mean a key for filtering and grouping objects so we can categorise and understand them. A conception is more like a meta name, a description of multiple circumstances or sets: In the case of natural numbers, the name's schema describes increasing +1 from 0 repeatedly without a limit. In the case of i, as a replacement for (√-1), and reversibly as replacing i2 with -1. In the case of a number line, it is the natural numbers increasing and subtracting from zero, each number of which can be divided by any other number to a point on the line. Finally, we can conceptually add an infinite term, and divide by it to create an infinitesimal and so create some place holding names for something that doesn't exist, but can be used to cancel out other series. So what else can be a conception?

I suggest anything that automatically creates a system of names - by which I mean the new sets - is a conception. So you could invent a conception to name every brick in your house by an index linked to a database of baby names; a fairly useless conception, but one you could spontaneously create for Bob, Billie, & Barbara Brick. So conceptions are clearly arbitrary. Conceptions have no ultimate or transcendent existence. We have created them as hyper real artifacts by abstraction from our language.

So conceptions are names attached to more complex descriptions, usually of name schemes, that help us manipulate schematic concepts. I disagree that the manipulations of conceptions are obvious as Wittgenstein says in 'Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus', but I do agree that they have implicit or explicit rules. These rules create a model, and flexing the model within the hyper real can tell you new things about the real and your concepts. For me here it is less interesting whether Wittgenstein was a finitist, but more of more interest in whether he, and therefore we, should be sceptical of the infinite, as I think we should. Having come to this conclusion, what can philosophy say to mathematicians about their working with infinity and some mathematicians' odd views that mathematical objects have transcendent existence?

I don't think philosophers have a lot to say to mathematicians on this topic because mathematicians, like Hilbert with his paradox of the Grand Hotel and the finitists, have already done extensive work themselves. So philosophers can only point out that some mathematicians are taking religious prejudices to work and should rethink their metaphysical assumptions and listen to the finitists. However the use of a finite model called infinity instead of an actual infinity may not always be that important if the placeholder allows the proof to be shown and an answer to be given. The conception of infinity has as much to say about metaphysics and language analysis as maths; so these I will discuss next.

In metaphysics there are two sides to the same argument, the first is the necessary non-existence of infinite properties as I mentioned previously. The other is that if we consider oneness, an axiom I used in blog 12 on axioms, we can suggest that there could be no unity to something if it was infinitely diffuse. There wouldn't be a facility to see the universe as a multidimensional monad, or pulsing with cause and effect as mentioned in blog 6 on causation. As Hilbert pointed out, there would be potentially infinite distances between points on an infinite line. This conclusion suggests distance would stop everything from interacting absolutely. So you couldn't smell infinity because it would be too far away.

In terms of language analysis, a conception is a function of the hyper real (as described in blog 11). We can see that there is more than simple names and propositions (as Wittgenstein described), for a conception is:

1) Named and referenced,

2) Has a schematic,

3) The schematic creates other names or allows substitution with other names,

4) Does not exist as an object (so may be impossible),

5) Is expressed in the hyper real,

6) Is an extension of language,

7) Can be compatible with an implicit logic or model.

Given the language and metaphysical analysis of infinity, we can see some parallels with our finding in the last blog, blog 18. Something has been theorised to exist which probably doesn't, and it became part of our grand theory or religious views. But, how excitingly, we can see that the normal expression of a grand theory is through a conception. So now we have a micro mechanism in language to anchor what we analysed was happening at a macro level in our theorising. We previously talked of making generalisations, now we can see that the language for generalisations are conceptions. From the last blog we know that generalisations/conceptions don't exist as objects, but are just patterns in the hyper real language, moving beyond a sign about signs, or language about names. So a generalisation is just one form of a conception. Specifically, a generalisation allows the substitution of a value loaded general term to take the place of multiple names.

How do we ground conceptions further? We can go further and say that the 'conception' is a conception itself. It is (1) named; (2) it has a schematic; (3) it is substitutable to its subsets including generalisations; (4) it is not an object but exists in language; (5) it is hyper real as we are thinking and writing about it; (6) it does extend language to a new area from Wittgenstein's 'Tractatus...'; and finally (7) it is compatible with the epistemological model of generalisation, induction, and identity mentioned in blog 5 on making generalisations as well as the last blog 18.

This is all very exciting philosophy tying together loose ends, but we can also comment a little more explicitly on rationalism, the belief you can learn new things by reasoning. Flexing a conception, a hyper real model, based on the rules of the schematic, will give logical and mathematical answers to hypotheses. This does not give a clear answer as to why rationalism works or when it will work, but it does explain why we get an answer. If we add in the principle of non-contradiction (see blog 6) and apply the schematic only to applicable real world objects, we can model those objects and learn new things about them rationally. I wouldn't (unlike Wittgenstein) call this information obvious or implicit as it might be complex, emergent, or even chaotic, and certainly not always an obvious tautology.

In the final conclusion, the smell of infinity opens up a lot of further analysis on knowledge, language, and the hyper real. So it is very useful even though we can show infinity doesn't exist in any objective terms. We can also account for infinity without relying on any dodgy metaphysics (like the flawed circularity of Plato's eternal forms), even if infinity has applications that are still partly mysterious within mathematics. I would encourage STEM students amongst others to focus more on the schematic descriptions used in their conceptions as experimenting might yield new mathematical or theoretical architecture, both through substitution and the conscious creating of schematics for new groups of names. As I will discuss in my next blog, this is not really the job of professional philosophers any longer.

#philosophy #metaphysics #mathematics #infinite #infinity #concept #conception #analysis #philosophical #logic #hyper #real #finitist #generalisations #Wittgenstein #theory #analytical

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kumail-fan · 3 years

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THOMAS DIGGES Gentleman and mathematician

Of all of the characters that figure in this particular study, Thomas Digges (c.1546-1595) is the best known, clearly inside the history of mathematics. Since the 1930s, once the Perfit Description has been reprinted as well as its own historic importance proclaimed, Digges was identified as the primary people advocate of Copernicanism in England. He has been awarded at least a little role in the narrative of Copernican astronomy and, by extension, at the larger narrative of the Scientific Revolution.

But astronomy was just 1 part of Digges's mathematical work. He was also active in a range of different subjects, from surveying and navigation, to artillery and military science. Two Nevertheless the varied accounts of the mathematical work accumulate instead to some disparate resumé than a coherent identification of Digges himself. . In part, this lack is a result of a long-standing failure to differentiate clearly between the work of Thomas Digges and of his dad, Leonard (c.1520-c.1559); Thomas's printed job was (quite literally) bound along with his daddy's. 3

Leonard had printed two vernacular texts mathematics in his life: an almanac and prognostication which appeared under different titles during the century (initially published c.1555), also Tectonicon (1556), a text on mensuration and mathematical tools. Along with those printed texts, Leonard promised a range of different functions whose look was averted by his premature death. A number of the material was later ready for posthumous book by Thomas, who made new developments of their own.

However, this text surveying and mensuration was composed by Leonard. Stratioticos was composed in three novels, where the first was founded on a living draft of Leonard's (1579: a2r). Though Thomas promised a variety of different volumes none seemed in print; his sole large further books were marginally enlarged second variations of Stratioticos (1590) and Pantometria (1591). 5

This fast bibliographic review suggests how profoundly interconnected were the printed works of Leonard and Thomas Digges. In addition, it indicates the problem of extricating the identities of dad and son. 6 The short and economical vernacular texts released by Leonard from the 1550s, with their focus on practical and popular mathematics, easily permit his identification among the first English [page 53:] mathematical professionals. Thomas was clearly allotted somewhere in E.G.R. Taylor's biographical record of professionals, but Taylor was ambivalent about Digges: she had been leery of him, watching him not as a admirably humble soul such as Robert Norman or even William Bourne but as an imperious (if not really arrogant) critic who had been too ready to dismiss the attempts of'mere' mechanicians. 7

The uncomfortable feeling of personal disapproval inherent Taylor's reaction to Digges may induce us to dismiss her remarks. But we shouldn't do this, because her bookings sprang out of a restricted understanding of what's still genuine evidence. Fully incorporating that proof in an account of Digges empowers us to describe his opinions and actions rather than simply judging them. In this chapter, I'll provide a fresh interpretation of the livelihood of Thomas Digges. As opposed to supposing that he was born into the use of mathematical practitioner, I'll reveal how he worked and reworked his function over a span of years. Specifically, I'll assert that his early aspirations and accomplishments cannot be readily reconciled with the familiar vision of the mathematical practitioner, which it was in later years he fashioned an individuality which marks him outside more carefully as a professional.

Digges is an perfect place for a study of altering mathematical identity, for he exhibited a rare amount of self-consciousness when introducing his works from the public medium of printing. The feeling he was fashioning his own individuality is strikingly evident in Stratioticos (1579). In the devotion and the preface for this army text, Digges looked back on the 1570s and maintained [page 54:] he had switched out of ancient contemplative issues with mathematical presentation to another emphasis on practical activities in support of prince and state (1579: A2r, A3r-v).

We shouldn't always take Digges's polar opposition between present action and preceding contemplation at face value; the familiarity of this trope of activity and contemplation must warn us that we're witnesses to rhetorical display instead of direct self-revelation. Really, once we come to check out the complete selection of Digges's math, the inadequacy of the speech of action and contemplation becomes evident. The connotations of'contemplation' seem improper for its lively and extensive work demanded by Digges's early analyses of strong geometry and astronomy. Conversely, the comprehensive demonstrative exposition of artillery which Digges planned in the conclusion of his life cannot be neatly accommodated within the class of'activity'. Therefore, as well as the shift he had been excited to emphasise 1579, there were so also important continuities during his career. Any decent interpretation wants to capture the character of the specialized mathematical work and at precisely the exact same time accommodate Digges's rhetoric, even accounting because of its terminology instead of implicitly endorsing or explicitly rejecting it.

Digges's autobiographical remarks in Stratioticos also point us in a different way, towards his social instead of simply his mathematical individuality. Digges's 1579 army discourse was dedicated to the Earl of Leicester, the potential leader of an expeditionary force into the Netherlands from the Spanish. The more densely Digges emphasised the divide between his current and previous selves, the more completely he managed to realign himself with all the governmental, spiritual and military [page 55:] ethos of his patron and dedicatee.

We can therefore put Digges's renovation of individuality within the modern operation of patronage. But we want a more comprehensive conception of patronage which treats it mostly as a medium of social credit instead of simply a mechanism for the transfer of financial gains from the elite for their social inferiors. 8 Unfortunately, efforts to describe Digges's livelihood with regard patronage have generally been conducted in reductionist terms. By way of instance, by using their economic capability to distribute largesse, Feingold accomplishes patrons as distinctively successful in their influence on customers. He baldly says that'Thomas Digges nearly left his theoretical research when he entered the service of the Earl of Leicester' and concludes , in doing this, Digges was reacting to his patron's dreams. 9 It's like Digges was only putty at the hands of the social superiors, not able to apply any personal option.

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thirst2 · 7 years

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The second half of my Sophomore year, I found myself standing in front of my floor’s bathroom’s toilet and wondering what the chance of success might be if I attempted to drown myself. For the first time, I didn’t have answers to school and, not having answers to things that Needed to Be Done™ – and, in turn, not knowing how to even begin them –, anxiety I wasn’t yet aware I had began to kick in. I’d binge through anything and everything that was remotely enjoyable or of interest to me (something I participated in just last Friday, actually…) in an attempt to avoid dealing with school work while my sleep plummeted because going to sleep somehow meant closing the day when I had not finished enough of the work I needed to do, yet. Waking up the next day, even if I went to bed early, with all my work, still, somehow felt too close to when I needed it done, even if I was more rested and coherent, and that just made the anxiety worse. I had just dropped Orgo last year and I had just finished a semester with five classes with relative ease and in topics I immensely enjoyed; nothing had prepared me for a situation like this (I was always prepared, in the past (often times without even trying)) and I didn’t have a plan for even going forward. How was I supposed to do the future if I couldn’t even keep myself out of situations like this? It was Orgo all over except I couldn’t afford to drop a class, again. I don’t know exactly why I was so concerned with my mother’s desires given I pretty much decided after this moment to only listen to myself since I knew my needs best – clearly – and listening to her got me stuck in Orgo in the first place (maybe because they were paying my tuition?) but dropping CS meant having to find another major, again, to satisfy her; a small piece was I really liked computers, too, and there wasn’t anything else that really grabbed my interest (that she would also approve of; winding up majoring in gender studies is probably a clear indication of other interest). I was disablingly anxious (I think my first panic attack was that semester…?) and I didn’t have a plan. The hallmark of every depressed person, the thought crossed my mind to kill my way out. I don’t have a real understanding of why I never attempted (my flippant reasoning was always that I was never brave enough) so, instead, I remember looking down at the toilet and promising to(/deciding for?) myself that, if I passed decreet math., I’d finish my CS degree. Some incoherent reasoning (because I was exhausted and suicidal) about, if I could pass this class, the others should be possible – in some how and some way, they have to be if I could get through before. I just had to figure out how. It’s reductionist, as I found a lot of my coping would become: if you were able to pass a course you had no prior experience with under similar environments inherent to most classes, you either have the resources in your capability (even if spurred out of you from desperation and fear) or the elements of the environment are forgiving enough to carry and tolerate you. This must bear to be true (within reasonable probability, at least). If the above is true, the details don’t matter; the circumstances don’t matter: your case covers all necessary circumstances you might have to worry about and must be true. Just keep your head down and move forward. More than anything, that moment taught me about limits. I’d gotten a C in Intro. to Chemistry and a C- in Calculus III. My habit of everything working itself out in school just fine made me pay very little notice to my actual grades through the courses and I hadn’t even noticed until I got my results at the end; the same habit in Orgo had…less harmless consequences. First step was to cut that shit out: I couldn’t afford to ignore my surrounding classes and assume I could handle them just fine. A heavier class meant lighter classes for the rest. And that might seem obvious but anyone with mental illness knows how much more stark that rule becomes: one class you might struggle with might mean the other three all become courses you can do on autopilot. And that would extend to the rest of my life. If showering every day took too much energy or time, cut it back. I might not always smell the best (and, if that bothered me, find less consuming ways to cover it up) but I came to win, damn it. If going to the dining hall took too much, being food with you back: it might not be ideal for what you can handle but it’s less energy than trekking out all the time. That’s a step; that’s improvement; that’s practical. Part of the rules of the game is that I don’t have answers; being reductive once more, that isn’t a fact I can change – I don’t. So the only option I have is the guess and then leap. Keep moving forward. To this day, I don’t truly know if I’ll make the next hurdle. I have a job, now, and there’s been once or twice I anxiety-procrastinated through a night and still found I was able to accomplish the thing later without consequence even though I thought I had to get it done, then. I don’t know; but I know when circumstances make things worse. So I adjust and keep myself moving. I…don’t know any other answer. When I was in high school, I mostly kept myself going because I didn’t know what else there was. Somewhere after college, it became because, after however many years of childhood abuse and not knowing how to be prepared for adulthood but wanting it simply because it wasn’t home – literally no other reason than it wasn’t abuse, anymore –, it felt like a giant fuck-you to life. After every setback accumulated, I still got out; I’m the one in control, now, with my own place and time. Wouldn’t that be just savory to say? And I finally made it. It’s bizarre, in its own way. I still have to really enjoy it to be worth it. But maybe that’s the next fuck-you. Life will never be easy or non-work, due to mental illness, but what if I could say I can do it? I’m petty and that’d be worth it to me. When I was looking for an apartment, I wanted to write a post about how I was so close and what that all meant. Once I moved in, I wanted to write something somewhat celebratory, maybe. I don’t feel either of those things, right now. Maybe it’s because I have some work I have to get done before Monday and I always go into mission-mode when something’s left hanging or needs to be done, still; good ol’ anxiety. Right now, I’m in a I-made-the-choices-I-did-and-I'll-brave-the-consequences-though-I-don't-really-know-what-they-are mode; I dunno. Emotions haven’t made sense to me since I was 13. But I came here to win, damn it.

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clarenceomoore · 5 years

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Voices in AI – Episode 84: A Conversation with David Cox

[voices_in_ai_byline]

About this Episode

Episode 84 of Voices in AI features host Byron Reese and David Cox discuss classifications of AI, and how the research has been evolving and growing

Listen to this one-hour episode or read the full transcript at www.VoicesinAI.com

Transcript Excerpt

Byron Reese: This is Voices in AI, brought to you by GigaOm and I’m Byron Reese. I’m so excited about today’s show. Today we have David Cox. He is the Director of the MIT IBM Watson AI Lab, which is part of IBM Research. Before that he spent 11 years teaching at Harvard, interestingly in the Life Sciences. He holds an AB degree from Harvard in Biology and Psychology, and he holds a PhD in Neuroscience from MIT. Welcome to the show David!

David Cox: Thanks. It’s a great pleasure to be here.

I always like to start with my Rorschach question which is, “What is intelligence and why is Artificial Intelligence artificial?” And you’re a neuroscientist and a psychologist and a biologist, so how do you think of intelligence?

That’s a great question. I think we don’t necessarily need to have just one definition. I think people get hung up on the words, but at the end of the day, what makes us intelligent, what makes other organisms on this planet intelligent is the ability to absorb information about the environment, to build models of what’s going to happen next, to predict and then to make actions that help achieve whatever goal you’re trying to achieve. And when you look at it that way that’s a pretty broad definition.

Some people are purists and they want to say this is AI, but this other thing is just statistics or regression or if-then-else loops. At the end of the day, what we’re about is we’re trying to make machines that can make decisions the way we do and sometimes our decisions are very complicated. Sometimes our decisions are less complicated, but it really is about how do we model the world, how do we take actions that really drive us forward?

It’s funny, the AI word too. I’m a recovering academic as you said. I was at Harvard for many years and I think as a field, we were really uncomfortable with the term ‘AI.’ so, we desperately wanted to call it anything else. In 2017 and before we wanted to call it ‘machine learning’ or we wanted to call it ‘deep learning’ [to] be more specific. But in 2018 for whatever reason, we all just gave up and we just embraced this term ‘AI.’ In some ways I think it’s healthy. But when I joined IBM I was actually really pleasantly surprised by some framing that the company had done.

IBM does this thing called the Global Technology Outlook or GTO which happens every year and the company tries to collectively figure out—research plays a very big part of this—we try to figure out ‘What does the future look like?’ And they came up with this framing that I really like for AI. They did something extremely simple. They just put some adjectives in front of AI and I think it clarifies the debate a lot.

So basically, what we have today like deep learning, machine learning, tremendously powerful technologies are going to disrupt a lot of things. We call those Narrow AI and I think that narrow framing really calls attention to the ways in which even if it’s powerful, it’s fundamentally limited. And then on the other end of the spectrum we have General AI. This is a term that’s been around for a long time, this idea of systems that can decide what they want to do for themselves that are broadly autonomous and that’s fine. Those are really interesting discussions to have but we’re not there as a field yet.

In the middle and I think this is really where the interesting stroke is, there’s this notion we have a Broad AI and I think that’s really where the stakes are today. How do we have systems that are able to go beyond what we have that’s narrow without necessarily getting hung up on all these notions of what ‘General Intelligence’ might be. So things like having systems that are that are interpretable, having systems that can work with different kinds of data that can integrate knowledge from other sources, that’s sort of the domain of Broad AI. Broad Intelligence is really what the lab I lead is all about.

There’s a lot in there and I agree with you. I’m not really that interested in that low end and what’s the lowest bar in AI. What makes the question interesting to me is really the mechanism by which we are intelligent, whatever that is, and does that intelligence require a mechanistic reductionist view of the world? In other words, is that something that you believe we’re going to be able to duplicate either… in terms of its function, or are we going to be able to build machines that are as versatile as a human in intelligence, and creative and would have emotions and all of the rest, or is that an open question?

I have no doubt that we’re going to eventually, as a human race be able to figure out how to build intelligent systems that are just as intelligent as we are. I think in some of these things, we tend to think about how we’re different from other kinds of intelligences on Earth. We do things like… there was a period of time where we wanted to distinguish ourselves from the animals and we thought of reason, the ability to reason and do things like mathematics and abstract logic was what was uniquely human about us.

And then, computers came along and all of a sudden, computers can actually do some of those things better than we can even in arithmetic and solving complex logic problems or math problems. Then we move towards thinking that maybe it’s emotion. Maybe emotion is what makes us uniquely human and rational. It was a kind of narcissism I think to our own view which is understandable and justifiable. How are we special in this world?

But I think in many ways we’re going to end up having systems that do have something like emotion. Even you look at reinforcement learning—those systems have a notion of reward. I don’t think it’s such a far reach to think maybe we’ll even in a sci-fi world have machines that have senses of pleasure and hopes and ambitions and things like that.

At the end of day, our brains are computers. I think that’s sometimes a controversial statement but it’s one that I think is well-grounded. It’s a very sophisticated computer. It happens to be made out of biological materials. But at the end of the day, it’s a tremendously efficient, tremendously powerful, tremendously parallel nanoscale biological computer. These are like biological nanotechnology. And to the extent that it is a computer and to think to the extent that we can agree on that, Computer Science gives us equivalencies. We can build a computer with different hardware. We don’t have to emulate the hardware. We don’t have to slavishly copy the brain, but it is sort of a given that will eventually be able to do everything the brain does in a computer. Now of course all that’s all farther off, I think. Those are not the stakes—those aren’t the battlefronts that we’re working on today. But I think the sky’s the limit in terms of where AI can go.

You mentioned Narrow and General AI, and this classification you’re putting in between them is broad, and I have an opinion and I’m curious of what you think. At least with regards to Narrow and General they are not on a continuum. They’re actually unrelated technologies. Would you agree with that or not?

Would you say like that a narrow (AI) gets a little better then a little better, a little better, a little better, a little better, then, ta-da! One day it can compose a Hamilton, or do you think that they may be completely unrelated? That this model of, ‘Hey let’s take a lot of data about the past and let’s study it very carefully to learn to do one thing’ is very different than whatever General Intelligence is going to be.

There’s this idea that if you want to go to the moon, one way to go to the moon—to get closer to the moon—is to climb the mountain.

Right. Exactly.

And you’ll get closer, but you’re not on the right path. And, maybe you’d be better off on top of a building or a little rocket and maybe go as high as the tree or as high as the mountain, but it’ll get you where you need to go. I do think there is a strong flavor of that with today’s AI.

And in today’s AI, if we’re plain about things, is deep learning. This model… what’s really been successful in deep learning is supervised learning. We train a model to do every part of seeing based on classifying objects and you classify a lot – many images, you have lots of training data and you build a statistical model. And that’s everything the model has ever seen. It has to learn from those images and from that task.

And we’re starting to see that actually the solutions you get—again, they are tremendously useful, but they do have a little bit of that quality of climbing a tree or climbing a mountain. There’s a bunch of recent work suggesting… basically they’re looking at texture, so a lot of solution for supervision is looking at the rough texture.

There are also some wonderful examples where you take a captioning system—a system can take an image and produce a caption. You can produce wonderful captions in cases where the images look like the ones it was trained on, but you show it anything just a little bit weird like an airplane that’s about to crash or a family fleeing their home on a flooding beach and it’ll produce things like an airplane is on the tarmac at an airport or a family is standing on a beach. It’s like they kind of missed the point, like it was able to do something because it learned correlations between the inputs it was given and the outputs that we asked it for, but it didn’t have a deep understanding. And I think that’s the crux of what you’re getting at and I agree at least in part.

So with Broad, the way you’re thinking of it, it sounds to me just from the few words you said, it’s an incremental improvement over Narrow. It’s not a junior version of General AI. Would you agree with that? You’re basically taking techniques we have and just doing them bigger and more expansively and smarter and better, or is that not the case?

No. When we think about Broad AI, we really are thinking about a little bit ‘press the reset button, don’t throw away things that work.’ Deep learning is a set of tools which is tremendously powerful, and we’d be kind of foolish to throw them away. But when we think about Broad AI, what we’re really getting at is how do we start to make contact with that deep structure in the world… like commonsense.

We have all kinds of common sense. When I look at a scene I look at the desk in front of me, I didn’t learn to do tasks that have to do with the desk in front of me by lots and lots of labeled examples or even many, many trials in a reinforcement learning kind of setup. I know things about the world – simple things. And things we take for granted like I know that my desk is probably made of wood and I know that wood is a solid, and solids can’t pass through other solids. And I know that it’s probably flat, and if I put my hand out I would be able to orient it in a position that would be appropriate to hover above it…

There are all these affordances and all this super simple commonsense stuff that you don’t get when you just do brute force statistical learning. When we think about Broad AI, we’re really thinking about is ‘How do we infuse that knowledge, that understanding and that commonsense?’ And one area that we’re excited about and that we’re working on here at the MIT IBM Lab is this idea of neuro-symbolic hybrids.

So again, this is in the spirit of ‘don’t throw away neural-networks.’ They’re wonderful in extracting certain kinds of statistical structure from the world – convolutional neural network does wonderful job of extracting information from an image. LSDMs and recurrent neural networks do a wonderful job of extracting structure from natural language, but building in symbolic systems as first-class citizens in a hybrid system that combines those all together.

Some of the work we’re doing now is building systems where we use neural networks to extract structure from these noisy, messy inputs of vision and different modalities but then actually having symbolic AI systems. Symbolic AI systems have been around basically contemporaneous with neural networks. They’ve been ‘in the wings’ all this time. Neural networks deep learning is in any way… everyone knows this is a rebrand of the neural networks from the 1980s that are suddenly powerful again. They’re powerful for the first time because we have enough data and we have enough compute.

I think in many ways a lot of the symbolic ideas, sort of logical operations, planning, things like that. They’re also very powerful techniques, but they haven’t really been able to shine yet partly because they’ve been waiting for something—just the way that neural networks were waiting for compute and data to come along. I think in many ways some of these symbolic techniques have been waiting for neural networks to come along—because neural networks can kind of bridge that [gap] from the messiness of the signals coming in to this sort of symbolic regime where we can start to actually work. One of things we’re really excited about is building these systems that can bridge across that gap.

Listen to this one-hour episode or read the full transcript at www.VoicesinAI.com

[voices_in_ai_link_back]

Byron explores issues around artificial intelligence and conscious computers in his new book The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity.

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babbleuk · 5 years

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Voices in AI – Episode 84: A Conversation with David Cox

[voices_in_ai_byline]

About this Episode

Episode 84 of Voices in AI features host Byron Reese and David Cox discuss classifications of AI, and how the research has been evolving and growing

Listen to this one-hour episode or read the full transcript at www.VoicesinAI.com

Transcript Excerpt

David Cox: Thanks. It’s a great pleasure to be here.

There’s this idea that if you want to go to the moon, one way to go to the moon—to get closer to the moon—is to climb the mountain.

Right. Exactly.

There are also some wonderful examples where you take a captioning system—a system can take an image and produce a caption. You can produce wonderful captions in cases where the images look like the ones it was trained on, but you show it anything just a little bit weird like an airplane that��s about to crash or a family fleeing their home on a flooding beach and it’ll produce things like an airplane is on the tarmac at an airport or a family is standing on a beach. It’s like they kind of missed the point, like it was able to do something because it learned correlations between the inputs it was given and the outputs that we asked it for, but it didn’t have a deep understanding. And I think that’s the crux of what you’re getting at and I agree at least in part.

Listen to this one-hour episode or read the full transcript at www.VoicesinAI.com

[voices_in_ai_link_back]

Byron explores issues around artificial intelligence and conscious computers in his new book The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity.

from Gigaom https://gigaom.com/2019/04/04/voices-in-ai-episode-84-a-conversation-with-david-cox/

#Gigaom

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braindamageforbeginners · 6 years

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On the nature of evil

Cycle 5, Day 9 I’m in the grips of an infusion hangover; it’s not the worst I’ve ever had, and I predict be back up to full-speed in a few hours, with the help of a lot of coffee and aspirin. However, recent events - combined with my fatigue (fhe coffee has’t kicked in yet) inspired me to go dig this out of the “Drafts” bin and finish rather than start from scratch. This will be long - my apologies - and have more than few typos and problems in it (for starters, I stitched it out of three or four other ideas/observations/proto-essays, and I’m all chemo hung-over now).

I’ve thought an awful lot lately about the nature of good and evil - as you do, when you face an existential threat that originates in your own body (and, because it’s me, I’m not going to get there in a straight-line path). I’m a reductionist (that’s shocking, I know), and, as a child, I wanted to know what made us us (DNA, I know, but I was hoping for more details). I once asked my high school biology teacher whether it would be more accurate to describe us as multicellular critters, or as walking colonies of specialized cells. She said the latter. Later in life, I put the same question to my biochemistry professor; his learned opinion was that we’re just walking, talking biochemical reactions that existed to provide the carbon molecules within us the best, most-stable shot in a hostile universe (that might seem dehumanizing until you realize that all life, in all its myriad forms, and all human progress and endeavors - from laying cement to composing an adagio - stem from a few basic rules of chemistry and physics, which is almost miraculous if you think about it). Which means that my tumor is the result of one or two brain cells getting very specific mutations (six or seven I think: I have the exact list of mutations written in my personal notebook, but I’m not sure it’s that interesting), and then growing, spreading, and recruiting other rogue cells. That’s not particularly evil; it’s just the horrible result of a few cells being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s just some rogue, reprogrammed bits of me; but, unlike the harmless bacteria in my gut or the fungus on my feet, it will grow and spread without constraint... until it kills me (hopefully that won’t happen, but it’s important to keep that in mind throughout the essay)..

One accusation I’ve occasionally heard leveled at atheists, agnostics, humanists, and other non-religious folk like myself is that by not having some grand villain to creation, we refuse to acknowledge the existence of evil. As a pragmatist, has always been, “Well, you have to. The bar has to be set somewhere.” Even though human morality may not exist in the vacuum of space beyond Pluto, humans have to have it - or at least pretend to (we’ll get to that very shortly). The best, most-useful definition comes from an obscure short story written by M. Shayne Bell, “Evil exists; it is intelligence in the service of entropy.”

To further pad this essay, and make it all about me; I have not mentioned my psychiatrist much (this isn’t Shrink; they’re two different people). This is both to protect her privacy, and because, despite what you might think from these writings, I do have aspects of my life I don’t spill out to the general public. But, she is - like everyone else on my health team - not above using any and all tools available to her. Which means that she’ll prescribe any medication she feels is indicated (I am indebted to her for her reviewing my meds and recommending the exotic antidepressant I’m on)(and the rather more-common anti-anxiety meds I’m on). However, despite being up-to-date on all psych meds (as far as I know, she specializes in cancer patients, so that one’s important)(she’s the doctor who noted my previous antidepressant lowers seizure threshold, so it might not be ideal for me), she’s still what I would call old-fashioned. Which she’ll listen for a few minutes, then say something deeply wounding. Or, worse, means she’ll say something innocuous that you’ll wake up at three am to think about. She was the person who told me to look at my current situation (namely, I have stay within easy driving distance of my oncology teams in SoCal and NoCal for a year) as a form of probation, rather than a sentence. I know my father hated that metaphor when I discussed it with him, but it was what I needed to hear (and, more importantly, she knows me well enough to know I despise and mistrust people who sugar-coat things) to start changing my thinking. A few months ago, when she asked how I spent most of my day, I told I wrote, went to the gym... and spent most of my time dealing with the unfortunate, bureaucratic paperwork and bills (well, as many as I can deal with) that tend to stack up when you get sick. Her response was, “That’s depressing” and it felt good initially, to hear a real grown-up say that, because it reassured me that I wasn’t just going insane. However, as I thought about it, I got angry, because she’s right - it is depressing - it should not be a full-time job to be a sick person, but that is exactly what it takes. I have access to some of the best doctors and medicine, and there is a still dangerous amount of luck involved in this project. There’s been a lot of skill on my part at gaming the insurance companies, when I can (which is rare), and I’ve had a tremendous amount of financial support from my family, but there are sick people who die by the boatload from very, very treatable diseases (yes, hospitals do throw you out; it actually happened to me). And even though there are resources available, there are not enough, and anyone who claims that we don’t have the money is clearly not familiar with the bloated military industrial complex, which even most hard-core conservatives I know admit is bloated.

If the theme of Day 47 was “How much have we, as a species, lost because we all went out of our way to stomp someone,” the theme of today is, “how many people have we unwittingly killed - how much blood is on our hands - because we never said “No” to the few dozen psychopaths who maintain a system that is addicted to death and misery. And, let’s be honest, there is a massive difference between considering how much potential we destroyed when we chased the neighbor kids off our lawn, and nobody giving Jeffrey Dahmer a damned good thrashing when he set the cat on fire (for starters, we can actually quantify Jeff’s evil based on how many people we found in the freezer; the mountains those kids never climbed are completely imaginary).

Returning to mathematics and statistics (it comforts me); just as I am a medical rarity (I’ve done the math, the word “freak” might be cruel, but it’s not inaccurate), but the vast majority of you, readers, are healthy and able-bodied - in other words, if the law of averages works, if you spread it across a population - then, just as I’m becoming aware that almost all of us are filled with madness and wonder and magic; then a few of us contain black holes from which light can not escape. Bipedal nightmares, if you will.

The point of this piece is not to frighten you, although some of you might be frightened. It’s merely to recognize that psychopaths and people with psychopathic tendencies (we’ll get there shortly) exist, and, in order to triumph, you don’t have to do much. Just don’t let them walk over you. That’s it.

Now, this is one area where I definitely am largely uneducated (I like writing, because, as long as I flash that warning up front, I feel I’ve done my duty), and I’m not going to discuss psychopaths (well, not yet, we’ll get there very shortly) inasmuch as I am going to discuss anti-social personality problems. Despite the name, it doesn’t describe people like myself who’d much rather sit at home with my dog, a beer, and the latest sci-fi series from Netflix rather than go out or meet new people (which I would, thanks). It describes people whose actions describe a lack of empathy or caring about other people; which includes psychopaths.

Here’s the thing; according to Ron Jonson’s “The Psychopath Test,” people with anti-social traits make up 1-3% of the general population, however, 30-40% of politicians, CEOs, financiers, etc. - the people at the helm of society, if you will - have anti-social personality traits. I’m sure that number is entirely inaccurate, and the wealthiest, most-powerful class of Western society is quite normal and compassionate, and we serfs are entirely responsible for the harmful, dangerous policies that govern us. I’m sure there’s some sort of long-term wisdom in the medico-legal policies governing my access to medicine I’m not aware of, and me dying or going bankrupt in the process is a minor price to pay for everyone else to benefit (and it might be, using that Law of Averages idea).

Of course, that might be a little extreme; however, law and morality are miles apart, and you confuse the two at your peril (as any racial minority who’s received an unnecessary traffic citation can attest). In my own case, at age 17, after an MRI confirmed that I had a brain tumor; my insurance company literally pulled the plug as I was being wheeled into the OR - entirely legally, I might add, using a loophole in the law in my coverage (I think it’s the hall-mark of morality to let a teen die of a preventable disease)(yes, hospitals do throw people out into the street). Thankfully, my parents were calmer and faster on their feet than I, and they were able to get things back on track - two days later.

The point is, we live in a society seemingly created by, and for, people who are unhindered by any sense of morality. Of course, I’ll admit that I’m an exceedingly small minority, and a self-solving problem, as far as society at large is concerned (literally, all it takes is stopping funding to a few programs at the FDA and NIH and I’ll be finding out if Pascalor or Marcus Aurelius was right. It’s quite possible the rules have changed (I’m sure they have, because I’ve successfully taken advantage of those changes)(and paid a lot of money for that privilege), and the faceless companies that were so eager to see me dead at various points are now fully-invested in my survival (good news, if I’m reading the FDA testing info right, I’m one of 80 people in this drug trial, and my gruesome end would represent a failure rate of 1.25%. I doubt that’s enough for them to step in and dramatically intervene on my behalf, but I’ll settle for CVS being a little more competent and generous about the Temodar).

As someone who is occasionally (okay, so more than occasionally) thoughtless or insensitive, but also horrified at the depths of human cruelty, I also feel like pointing out that we have an unhealthy fascination with anti-social personalities and anti-social personality problems. We marry them. We vote for them. We work for them. When, quite frankly, all it would take would be us - or someone else along the line - refusing to let these idiots get away with it. If we made them pay their taxes and stand at the back of the line. Now, that wouldn’t rid of us John Wayne Gacy or Ted Kaczynski, but they aren’t the problem. Adolf Eichmann is. Those of you familiar with recent history will probably have recoiled from the screen - probably rightfully; to the rest of you; Eichmann was a Colonel in the SS, and one of Hitler’s lieutenants; if there is one single person responsible for the planning and execution of the “Final Solution,” it is this man. Yes, I just broke Godwin’s Law, because the problem with Nazi Germany wasn’t actually the Nazis. Don’t get me wrong; they had to go; my point is, the relatively few Nazi zealots in power would have been completely incapacitated if their clerks and underlings had simply refused orders. Or if someone had dragged them off and told them that wasn’t cool.

Of course, this is being played in real-time with US detention of immigrant children. Again, I’ll bring up Nazis, but in this terrifying context: they didn’t have first, or even the biggest genocide; they were just the first to keep records that allowed the prosecution to build a case. So when you hear a hospital administrator say, “We’ll get back to you about that,” or a border bureaucrat say “We don’t know where the girls and toddlers are,” it should raise the hackles on the back of your neck. Once you get lost in the paperwork - in medical administration or the actual administration - that’s the first, quiet sign that someone doesn’t want to be held accountable if something bad happens (to counteract that, I’ve had good luck demanding to speak to supervisors or get employee ID numbers)(we will ignore the irony - in a few cases - that I was way too tired or in pain to really back up any threats).

At each step in this thing from July 5, 2002 until now, I’ve been lucky enough to find great doctors, surgeons, nurses, etc. who cared about their patients. Sadly, we live in a society that views Gregory House as a realistic character (there’s a fun med student drinking game where you sip whenever he inadvertently kills a patient). And the common thread throughout is that no one thinks it’s just a job or a paycheck or a way to get rich (if you want that, get MBA and become a hospital administrator - they’re usually paid way more than doctors). I think Mad Scientist and Senior Warlock would show up at the hospital tomorrow if they won the Powerball today (I could see them quitting work after finding some definitive cause of brain tumors and/or winning a Nobel Prize). In other words, the trick to finding great medical groups - is the same trick as finding someone who loves their job and would keep working even if all their financial obligations were met. In other words, you find someone who loves their job or their patients, and they’ll focus on being a better doctor. Which means fewer mistakes and/or dead patients.

To tie this all together - or attempt to, this is a Frankenstein’s Monster of writing combined with a morning head - I met, a med student a number of years ago (two neurosurgeries), who said, about my near-disastrous first-surgery (that’s the one where I was thrown out of the hospital while being wheeled into the OR, thanks to an insurance screw-up) that the medical system - such as it is, was more or less fine, dismissing me with “I’m sorry things didn’t work out for you.“ Telling someone they deserve to die due to profit margins and bureaucracy is right up with “Have you gained weight” as far as ways to promptly alienate and piss off other people. He also boasted about how many women hit on him, even though he wore a wedding ring (to be fair, I’d give it a 50-50 chance his wife was actually his mother’s corpse in a wedding dress), and how you have to be careful when providing free service because “poor people will tell their friends” - that man was not very smart (although I have no doubt he’d pass an IQ test)(BTW, there are a lot of studies showing that IQ tests are only slightly better than the MBTI or mood rings when judging intelligence; and it’s telling that whenever one of my crazy, brilliant physicians wants to assess my intelligence, they don’t use an IQ test), but, as far as I know, there are no set systems in place to ensure he didn’t graduate and go into practice (I mean, it’s possible he passed through med school and never got into a residency; I really hope some interview board looked at each afterward and said, “This is the creepiest motherfucker I’ve ever met; do we need another cadaver?”) . And, if he is practicing, I promise you - I’d bet my new lease on life on that statement (you need to understand, though, you’re betting your life on that statement if you’re one of his patients) - that he has, probably unintentionally, killed people because of his complete lack of interest in anything apart from money, sex, and self-aggrandizement - he has absolutely no interest or incentive to improve himself, or save more people, or take anything, other than his bank account to the next level. It’s possible the fear and/or wrongful death suits got to him (again, that’s assuming a lot). It’s a single case, but it’s demonstrative that our society has no real check against human evil or one person getting a dangerous amount of power. You can read into that whatever political statements you like, I’m just noting as a chronic patient a few observations about the importance of compassion (or curiosity) as a quick indicator of physician quality.

The other important lesson here regarding medical sociopathy - and I might’ve written about this previously, forgive me - is that talent attracts talent. I write a lot about the nurses and physicians, but in the chemo ward, I have never seen the orderlies not take out the trash and/or replace linens (and they recently went on strike - and I really hope they got all their demands met, because they’re making it possible to be in a hospital and not feel under a microbial threat). My point is, even the orderlies - a group no one ever thinks of, are top-level. And when that’s just the cleaning staff, everyone else is of a similar competence. I don’t know why they (the orderlies) work there - it might just be a paycheck - but they’re good, and the nurses and doctors aren’t going to outshone by the facilities. Meanwhile, think of that one great doctor in an otherwise lousy practice or hospital. Go ahead and do some research if necessary; I’ll wait. I’m guessing there aren’t a whole lot.out there.

To bring all of this back to the current medico-political situation, the White House has something of a staffing problem, to say the least. At this point, I believe we have a series of rubber stamps in office at this point (everyone familiar with my “Fall Risk” story will know how I feel about that issue), and not particularly competent ones. That’s disturbing in and of itself, but the greater problem is that it’s an endorsement of psychopathy as policy, and, as noted, psychopaths aren’t even particularly intelligent or efficient. But, more importantly, the way you’re betting - if you’re a majority member - is that you will be, personally as wealthy, healthy, and powerful as you are now, and that you will never need the help of someone else. If you don’t feel comfortable with that, then maybe just slap the bullies when you see them. I’m more-serious than you might think; they’re not all going to stand down and behave, but it’s a safer bet than that Immortan Joe will overlook you and behave charitably.

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apgrdn-blog · 7 years

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A non-number of things

We have such an obsessive relation to things, objects, stuff, that it is almost impossible to conceptualise anything (the word itself is a giveaway) without thinking in reductionist terms that bring whatever the thing is into a framework of understanding that heavily relies on the objective, tangible presence of something we can touch, hold, draw a line around (if conceptual), and put in a (metaphorical) box. It is hard to conceptualise any thing, in other words, that is not a thing. It seems that grasping a thing’s thingness helps us be more comfortable with the world, and maybe sleep better at night too.

Perhaps the thing is that we need other words. Is that a thing? Genuine question. I don’t want to turn this into a pun, but I have a feeling it is in the very way of the words that are at our disposal. Or perhaps it is in the way we use them?

Of course: love, music, art, etc. But even there, we still manage to keep these phenomena curtailed for the comfort we feel in relation to being in the material world... Sigh. No, this is not going down the George Harrison route. What I mean is: we like that we can smoke a cigarette after sex (or whatever), Hollywood gets it right there, even if the cigarette is really a cup of chamomile tea or another game of whatever-it-is-you-do-on-your-smartphone.

Forget sex. Take another example. How many times have you had someone listen to “a song”, and played only 10 to 30 seconds of a track? This is not listening to music. There is little essential difference between this and, say, showing off a new pair of shoes. Nothing per se, just saying. I like songs. And shoes.

An inkling of where this is going is coming to me. I think what I am driving at has to do with writing. Most things do these days. Did I mention I am supposed to be writing a phd dissertation? Yes, well. // Does art have to be artifact? Does writing have to become text? In the finality-imbued, systematic, structurally-sound sense-of-self way we mean when we say text...

We love things, I love things, who am I kidding.

And then there is the importance of process. These considerations are one-sided. Of course, we all inherently understand and connect with the concept of process. We all know, somehow, that nothing exists in a vacuum. That you do not become this, or become that instantaneously... Similarly, you cannot have this object, or that object, without that object coming from somewhere, from having been conceived, designed, built. We know this!

What’s the problem then?

We must know better. Not more, better. This means so much, I could continue expounding exegesis until kingdom come or not come. You never are the thing you say you are, you’re always in the process of becoming it. This is why musicians paint, artists ..art, and writers write, a lot. It’s also why you clean your house. Learning to know means knowing to learn. It involves a feel for the change that brings us in and out of being, and being able to. We inherently know that an athlete does better in good conditions, and some of us know these conditions are fragile. Competition gives an obvious edge, or a shiny gloss to this issue, but it is essentially the same for everyone, all the time, more most things.

10.

X marks the spot. Put on your math caps. X is the variable. Basic algebra. Could be this, could be that, could be fucking anything -within reason that is (here read: realm of definition). Assume there is an X hiding behind everything. Or, come to think of it, assume there is an unknown function f(x)=somethingsomethingsomethingsomething hiding behind everything, which is even better. You must assume the curve is on the move: your little arse is cruising coordinates all the way up and down the Y and Z axes. And if this is confusing, just ask a 17 year old.

11.

Axes is the shared plural form of nouns ax, axe, and axis, though it comes with different pronunciations. No one seems to care that much, however, if this /r/Showerthoughts/ is any indicator.

13.

When I write, I am able to get into the movement of things that are not things. This is interesting to me. This is where I seek, not what, just where.

14.

Goodnight is not an object, it is a village in Missouri, and an unincorporated community in Kentucky, Oklahoma and Texas.

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globalwarmingisreal · 7 years

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Climate Refugees, the Paris Agreement, and the Delusion of Isolation

One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic

Be it from social unrest, economic upheaval, or environmental collapse, forced human migration is at unprecedented levels. According to the UNHCR, there are more than 65 million displaced people in the world today. Of those, more than 22 million are forced refugees. Over half are under 18 years old. Nearly 20 people are displaced from their homes every minute.

Sixty-five million people forced to flee their homes? However disquieting, it almost doesn’t matter. As awful as that sounds, our emotional and mental resources aren’t naturally up to the task of finding empathy for so many. What researchers call “compassion fade” creates “psychic numbing.” Our minds are desensitized by numbers like these. It is, as research psychologist Paul Slovic calls it, the “arithmetic of compassion.” It’s hard for us to wrap our heads around such numbers. We are much more likely to respond to the image of one single child – bruised, dazed, and recently orphaned sitting alone in an ambulance – than to the collective human tragedy swirling around one unfortunate little boy. Overcoming this cognitive dissonance between caring and callousness is no easy task, but necessary. We risk allowing the numbers of displaced people to expand by orders of magnitude, overwhelming not only the material resources but also the compassion to care. Ostensibly due to civil wars, religious extremism, and political unrest, there is one underlying progenitor to forced human migration.

Until we address it, no humanitarian aid, no travel ban, no walled-off border will slow the tragedy of human displacement. It is the one common denominator that we all share: the planet; living on it.

Confluence

Violence and unrest spread across the Middle East into Europe and further. In its wake, a growing “tide” of human migration. For some, it is a crisis of conscience, for others, a threat to their perceived well-being and cultural identity. For most of us, it’s numbing. For all, figuring a solution to the refugee crisis remains elusive. The problem seems intractable, but we look for easy answers. People continue to suffer, lives are uprooted, children orphaned, but we propose policies that do little to address the root causes. Vigilance turns to aggression; caution to isolation.

For executive director Joe Speicher, and his colleagues at the Autodesk Foundation, human migration is ground zero for impact. Speicher works on-the-ground in some of the world’s most vulnerable areas where human migration and climate change converge to help bring relief from immediate threat and solutions to long-term risks. With their partners from around the globe (including the UNHCR), Speicher and his colleagues see first-hand the tragedy, heartbreak, and inhumanity of the refugee crisis. In the context of ongoing human suffering, it may seem counter-intuitive, but the refugee crisis will never be solved until and unless we deal with climate change. In fact, it will only get worse. “We think 65 million refugees currently around the world – that we know of – is a lot,” he says.

“If we don’t deal with the impacts of climate change, the number of refugees increases by orders of magnitude.”

We spoke Speicher on World Refugee Day. He doesn’t typically “assign much value” to “World (pick your issue) Day” observances “ He makes an exception for World Refugee Day.”This is the perfect issue conflating social impacts and environmental impacts,” Speicher says.

“These are emergent problems with multivariate inputs that lead to something like the Syrian crisis. Climate change is one of the underlying causes.”

Research suggests climate change could force between 200 and 500 million coastal residents from their homes in the next 30 to 80 years. Imagine the social tension with a half-billion people in migration. “We don’t connect those dots enough because it’s complicated,” Speicher says.

“It’s much easier in the reductionist political discourse to point to one thing”

Of those that have connected the dots, however, few are more formidable than the U.S. armed forces.

Red team, blue team; no time, no reason

For years, military leaders have warned of the cascading regional climate impacts that jeopardize global security and disrupt the geopolitical map. Climate change is on the military’s “radar” as a threat multiplier. The generals and admirals understand global warming much better than their current civilian leaders. But in Washington, the Trump administration’s EPA chief Scott Pruitt invites yet more “discussion” about the veracity of climate science, instead of the real issue of what to do about it. The well-worn playbook of false equivalency and obfuscation continue with renewed vigor from the new U.S. administration.

“The Department of Defense mitigates against the risks climate change,” says Speicher,”Yet, we continue to debate (climate change) at the 30,000-foot view in Washington, D.C.” Perhaps even worse than the ceaseless effort to dilute the issue is President Trump’s attempt to isolate the United States from the rest of the world on every important issue of national and global stability. As Speicher says, the refugee crisis is a confluence of the pressing social and environmental impacts caused, in part at least, by climate change.

Global warming cedes authority to no border. Despite the president’s desire to wall off the country from all travails of the outside world, it is a futile ambition. Isolation cannot be achieved and it is not leadership in a complex world.The human story of climate displacement is already begun. And not only in some far-flung corner of the world, but right here in Donald Trump’s America. “We are already resettling climate refugees in the U.S.,” says Speicher.

From the Bayous of Louisiana to the barrier islands off the Atlantic coast and native villages of Alaska, climate change has arrived and it is taking names.

Laughing at us

The president represents all Americans everywhere. Including Pittsburgh. While a nominally clever soundbite, the implication inherent in “Pittsburgh, not Paris doesn’t add up.

Today, there are more than 90 coastal communities in the United States struggling with chronic flooding. The kind of flooding, writes Laura Parker in National Geographic, that is “so unmanageable it prompts people to move away.” According to a study published in the journal Elementa, more than 170 U.S. communities face flooding and inundation within less than 20 years. The very people he says will “no longer be forgotten” are first in line to feel the impact of global warming.

President Trump claims that U.S. participation threatens coal jobs, sacrifices our economic advantage, and, worse yet, is little more than a global inside joke. People are “laughing at us.” Nobody likes getting laughed at.

Behind the vague, isolationist, and misinformed reasoning for withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, the President reveals his essential “us vs. them” mentality; admittedly never far from the surface in any case. Yielding to the self-interest his EPA administrator and chief strategist, President Trump is unable to grasp the significance of the Paris Agreement, let alone its specific details, let alone the gravity of the situation. With a unique twist of neurosis thrown in for good measure: “We don’t want other leaders and other countries laughing at us anymore,” he says to the world. “And they won’t be. They won’t be.”

In President Trump’s mind, there are no win-win scenarios. It is always a simple zero-sum game. The Paris Agreement is, by design, a means of gaining “advantage” over the U.S.

“The rest of the world applauded when we signed the Paris agreement – they went wild, they were so happy – for the simple reason that it put our country, the United States of America, which we all love, at a very, very big economic disadvantage.”

Despite President Trump’s logic, the economic disadvantage of climate change is not from action or participation in the hard-won Paris Agreement, but from inaction and isolation. “This is not an issue that, as we do all too often, allows us to avoid the prevention upfront and seek treatment after the fact,” says Speicher.

Doing the math, no place to hide

In his interview with David Muir last January, President Trump makes a valid point when he tells Muir that the “world is a mess.” Indeed, it is true. Many unprecedented challenges define our new century. There is no assurance we are heading in a direction from which we will emerge into the next century “happily ever after.”

So, yes, on the face of it, President Trump’s perspective is credible. Such a worldview is arguably even more troubling than the “mess” we are in. We look to our leaders to shape the narrative around which we define the dangers and possibilities of our times. Whatever the politics, we remember best those who inspire within us a vision of how the world should be, could be. By tapping into the emotional psyche of society, people are motivated to action by a common narrative, driven either by fear and distrust

We look to our leaders to shape the narrative around which we define the dangers and possibilities of our times. Whatever the politics, we remember best those who inspire within us a vision of how the world should be, could be. By tapping into the emotional psyche of society, people are motivated to action by a common narrative, driven either by fear and distrust or hope and unity. I suggest that President Trump’s rhetorical style is less than inspirational. His reasoning for withdrawing from the Paris Agreement does not reflect our better nature. It belies the arithmetic of compassion. The failure of his vision acquiesces to his emotional limitations; forsaking the long, hard road of global cooperation in service of our common challenges. The United States is no longer reliable as a global leader. And so, we look elsewhere for leadership. Business leaders, mayors, governors, citizens.

I suggest that President Trump’s rhetorical style is less than inspirational. His reasoning for withdrawing from the Paris Agreement does not reflect our better nature. It belies the arithmetic of compassion. The failure of his vision acquiesces to his emotional limitations; forsaking the long, hard road of global cooperation in service of our common challenges. The United States is no longer reliable as a global leader. And so, we look elsewhere for leadership. Business leaders, mayors, governors, citizens.

“President Trump’s short-sighted and politicized decision to pull out of the Paris Agreement has catalyzed corporations, states, and cities to do even more for climate change,” Speicher says, “creating a path forward to help solve two crises – climate change and refugees.”

“If we want to keep those numbers manageable,” Speicher says, “we’ve got to start dealing with the impacts of climate change.”

Some may argue the number of refugees in the world is already at unmanageable levels. Some seek to wall off their surroundings from the tumult of human misery. That works, perhaps, for some; for a little while. It is no solution. Isolation is a delusion motivated by fear. Climate change, and the human unrest it engenders, finds us all.

Images courtesy of United Nations, White House This article originally appeared in TriplePundit

The post Climate Refugees, the Paris Agreement, and the Delusion of Isolation appeared first on Global Warming is Real.

from http://bit.ly/2v80usn

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rah320-blog · 7 years

Quote

Today it is common to hear the suggestion [cooperative] education and [therapeutic] training is the [mindful] key to allowing people to contribute to a more sustainable [ecopolitical] future. Although I recognize the value of formal education and training and [especially cooperatively-owned and managed] communications media, they are also part of the [competitively commodified] problem [and therefore also keys to more resonantly cooperative resolutions] preventing [LeftBrain dominant] us from a more direct [RightBrain-inductive] connection with, and [bilateral] experience of, the natural[-spiritual co-arising] world through [inductive/deductive bilateral] observation and [bicamerally balancing] experience [and work/play of curiosity/imagination]. Much could be said about how we need to modify formal education and the [competitively capital-hungry] media so they can contribute better to the [humane-sublime polypathic multiculturing creolic] revolution, but we need to recognize several fundamental [Leftbrain dominant enculturation] problems. First, almost all education, and especially higher [yet not necessarily deeper] education, is [redacted] knowledge from secondary [audio-visual] sources, interpreted through [competing specialist] frameworks of [limited inter-relational] understanding. Academic [exegetical LeftBrain dominant] training that requires every idea and concept be referenced to refereed published [exegetical LeftBrain dominant] sources is the extremity of this [conserving rather than transitioning] approach to [reiterative monoculturing memorization of what once was normatively true and necessarily so, yet perhaps not optimally or even sufficiently true for all times and spaces and complex systems and so yet hypothetically false, BothAnd recreatively tensioned with EitherOr.] Second, information technology has accelerated the speed of circulation, retrieval and reproduction [rights] of [nutritional/toxic] information. The [commercial] professional packaging of [LeftBrain reductive] secondary experience in [massively cooperatively networked] media promises faster and better ways to [LeftBrain access others'] learn[ing]. For instance, in comparison to the wildlife [ecological healthy/toxic] observation skills and original [6-sensory-neural (sight, sound, hearing, smell, touch, internal positive/negative feeling nutritional spectrum) bicamerally polypathic ecosystemic] thinking. Third, almost all formal scientific education is based on bottom-up reductionist [STRUGGLING EITHER/OR AGAINST top-down bilateral deductivist/inductivist BothAnd] thinking [screening out cognitive-affective dissonance, negative unresolved non-resonant psychology]. While the [cooperative multi]cultural harvest from specialized reductionist thinking over the last few hundred years has been great [and continues to accelerate], it is the [cooperatively self-organizing] integration and [creolizing] cross-fertilization of [regenerative Yang-cause] concepts and [Yin-nurturing/caustic BothAnd bilateral-dialectal matriarchal implicated affect] ideas that is now providing the most fruitful results for dealing with the [Yang/Yin eco]systemic [landscape/climate] problems of the [regenerative-less/degenerative-more] environmental crisis. Much of this [positive co-relational co-arising] integrated [comprehension] is happening outside [formal] educational [pathology-oriented, continuing competing-issues committed] institutions [with highly competitive ecopolitical survival issues, including chronic capital reinvestment]. Ironically, information and communications technologies are increasing these [cooperative paid-forward, co-redemptive] possibilities, although this benefit is over [LeftBrain dominant] content, and [redundantly tedious] replication over [re]creation; [degenerative reiterative feedback loops rather than cooperative self-governing regenerative double-binding ego/eco-conscious loops]. Fourth, and most problematic of all, formal education at the higher [yet not deeper] levels is focused on digesting massive amounts of information within the [slow-growth evolving creolizing] constructs of separate [and alarmingly unequal] disciplines and cultures (such as [Left-Yang, EitherOr] science and [Right-Yin, BothAnd] art [nurturing octave flow-fractal regenerative functions, like 4Base fractal/crystal group/game math, and 4Season phylogenic reproductive rights and wrong]). This education lacks wholistic [therapeutic] integration with [health-wealth ecopolitically oriented] living experience and its insights and truths often make little [shallow] impression on the underlying [Right-YinFlow nurturing-absorbing-resonant] structures of [comprehensive] understanding and [internally felt committed] belief [as co-empathic trust] created by [LeftBrain might makes right] family [conservative-supremacist] upbringing, mass [consuming dominating producer] media and popular [nationalized ecopolitical WinLose competition] culture. In many fields we find the [global glory] solutions to [ecological within and without] problems are known [and felt] but are not [regeneratively] applied for a myriad of specific [LeftBrain constipated cul-de-sac] reasons. The core of these problems is [competing mutually mis-communicating and therefore gradually degenerating exegetical-monoculturing belief systems] which people appear to [conserve to defensively] hold have not been [creolic EitherOr-evolution/BothAnd-revolution] integrated with and [regeneratively-therapeutically-cooperatively] reinforced by their [Left-Right bicameral polypathic ecologically ecopolitical] personal experience [of regenerative health and competitively degenerative pathologies].

David Holmgren

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