The Symposium - 2014-09-03

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Joseph Weissman

12:35 AM

30m to go! :)

1

Q: Philosophy Question Challenge: Ethics

It's time for the second in an ongoing series of question challenges! Please consider joining us for a midweek roundtable to share ideas. Background ethics, with 392 questions, is one of our community's strongest subject areas overall, although it remains a distant second to the behemoth logic ...

discussion featured community question-challenge

Joseph Weissman

12:58 AM

A few minutes and change to go.

I don't really have much of an agenda or anything besides just opening the floor for discussion on the weekly theme

It will probably take some time to build interest in the challenges and especially these chats -- though there has been a lot of activity around ethics, but it's kind of hard to separate the challenge out from such a popular subject

Anyway, I'll just leave the floor pretty open for the next hour or so. --But of course I would be curious if you have ideas for applied ethics questions...

So welcome to the first of hopefully a series of weekly discussions!

Hi... Just dropped in because I discovered your twitter account and realized you were interested in the connection between fractals and philosophy.

Joseph Weissman

Hey there @ChrisSunami, I think you were the only other registrant :)

Oh nice! So it's you!

Yeah! Really just a general interest in complex systems, though of course fractals are beautiful...

I've been deeply into chaos for nearly 25 years now, and fractal geometry underlies a lot of my philosophical concepts

I used to run a site called Fractal Metaphysics, but it ended up being too fringe-y

Joseph Weissman

Oh, interesting

Yes, it is difficult to separate the signal from the noise

I've always been surprised more people haven't drawn the connections.

Tell me a little more about Fractal Ontology and what that term means to you...

Joseph Weissman

1:07 AM

It was difficult enough for Mandelbrot to convince mathematicians it was even maths... :)

the sign of being ahead of your times I suppose...

Joseph Weissman

Well, Guattari uses the phrase somewhere, I think that's where I'd go trying to explain it point blank

> But he [Lacan] did not realize the consequences of his rupture with Freudian determinism, and didn’t appropriately situate “desiring machines” — whose theory he had iniated — within incorporeal fields of virtuality. This object-subject of desire, like strange attractors in chaos theory, serves as an anchorage point with a phase space (here, a universe of reference) without ever being identical to itself, in permanent flight on a fractal line.

> In this respect it is not only fractal geometry that must be invoked, but fractal ontology. It is the being itself which transforms, buds, and transfigures itself. The objects of art and desire are apprehended within the existential Territories which are at the same time the body proper, the self, the maternal body, lived space, refrains of the mother tongue, familiar faces, family lore, ethnicity… No existential approach has priority over another.

> Thus it’s not a question of a causal infrastructure and of a superstructure representative of the psyche, or of a world separated from sublimation. The flesh of sensation and the material of the sublime are inextricably interwoven. Relationship to the other does not proceed through identification with a preexisting icon, inherent to each individual. The image is carried by a becoming other, ramified in becoming animal, becoming plant, becoming machine and, on occasion, becoming human.

That's from Chaosmosis

Interesting... never heard of the author or the work, I

I'll have to try to obtain a copy

Is it recent?

Joseph Weissman

70s! :)

I suppose that's recent, philosophically speaking

Joseph Weissman

1:10 AM

I guess Chaosmosis might've been 80s already

amazon.com/Chaosmosis-Ethico-Aesthetic-Paradigm-Felix-Guattari/…

Yeah, it's the last book

At least singly-authored; I wonder if What is Philosophy? was finished later

So actually mid-nineties

I actually know very little about recent philosophy... the little I've read hasn't inspired me to read much more

Joseph Weissman

Very recent, in the geological scales of philosophy :)

I will definitely try to find a copy

Joseph Weissman

There's also some fractal material in A Thousand Plateaus

just wondered if it was around back when I was doing the site... I had tried to find what was around, but the web was much less extensive in those days.

same author?

Joseph Weissman

1:12 AM

Well, Deleuze + Guattari

Very interesting. And what in the idea of fractal ontology speaks to you?

Joseph Weissman

They're concerned with "smooth" spaces

yes?

Joseph Weissman

Well, fractals present mathematics with a new theory of "roughness" of curves or planes

It's something that proved very difficult to speak about, very alien to our way of thinking about geometries -- the fractional number of dimensions which defines them

yes very non Euclidian

so what does that mean to you vis a vis your philosophy

Joseph Weissman

1:16 AM

In ATP they emphasize that fractals are also "real" forms -- Brownian motion and turbulence, the sky

Not merely these abstract spaces or curves, punctured pure volumes and monstrous snowflakes

yes, far from being hypothetical fantasies, they are the very stuff of life itself

lungs, veins, riverbeds

ferns, trees, the patterns on a mollusk shell

Joseph Weissman

Exactly! D+G say it provides a "general determination" for smooth space

hmmm, I might have to see that in context to get more of a sense of what they mean by that...

Joseph Weissman

Well, a determination of smooth space in terms of its relationships to 'striated' or metric space

But yes, it is a bit out of context, it's p. 486-8 of this edition

At any rate. Chaos is definitely interesting.

Hey there, @ArtemKaznatcheev :)

So setting up a dialectic between the natural and the man made geometries perhaps?

Artem Kaznatcheev

1:22 AM

I didn't know you guys had an active third space @JosephWeissman

Joseph Weissman

@ArtemKaznatcheev sometimes! :)

Artem Kaznatcheev

@JosephWeissman That's interesting. I will try to drop by more often. I am used to the third space being dead on most SEs

Joseph Weissman

@ChrisSunami Yes, perhaps; but I think it's just an interesting "metamodel" for them; it motivates a theory of fuzzy aggregates and smooth, amorphous spaces "constituted by an accumulation of proximities"

Hello @ArtemKaznatcheev this is my first time in the phil chat

Artem Kaznatcheev

@ChrisSunami me too. Unfortunately I am not a very active participant on Phil.SE in general :(.

1:25 AM

my interest has tended more to the practical applications of fractal geometry in the philosophical realm

Joseph Weissman

@ChrisSunami what does that entail?

consider the fractal nature of Plato's Republic --the soul of each republican is constituted as is the city as a whole

the whole is contained in the part, just as in Sierpinski's gasket

Joseph Weissman

sure, the golden ratio is important conceptually here too

(the lesser is to the greater, as the greater is to the whole)

Or consider the iterated fractal method of generating fractal images.

Joseph Weissman

@ChrisSunami the microcosm is fractal on at least three planes, I was thinking about this earlier in chat -- the soul, the household, the city

1:28 AM

Given a consistent set of rules, even when one randomly chooses among them, the same overall shape inevitably emerges

Joseph Weissman

Hmm.

Yes, exactly. For Plato everything good is constituted in the same way at every level of scale.

As far as the IFS system, I see implications for ethics

Joseph Weissman

Really?

If you consistently ask the right moral questions, it may not matter, over the long term, what the answers are.... IFS

Joseph Weissman

I'm not sure I follow? --Do you mean that decisions involve micro-decisions or something...?

1:31 AM

Sorry, I can get a little elliptical...

first, are you familiar with IFS? It's the technique where the fractal shape emerges from a cloud of randomly selected points

Artem Kaznatcheev

@JosephWeissman where does the household come in for Plato? Also, you forgot the universe for a level. The soul is structured in similar way to the universe as a whole for Plato and many of the pre-Socratics.

Joseph Weissman

@ArtemKaznatcheev that's right

I was going to mention that, that all the planes are "cosmoses" or orderly systems in their own right, and that the Universe was also such a system...

Well, the basic division is something like -- psyche, oikos, polis (soul, household, city)

@ArtemKaznatcheev exactly. In fact the relationship of the soul to the city is really there as a model for understanding that the universe is composed the same way

Joseph Weissman

Oikos has the same root that we get economics, etc., from; to my mind this points to the role that importance that discussion of different roles in the city plays in the Socratic dialogues (the tradesmen and politicians and artisans, etc., etc)

Artem Kaznatcheev

@JosephWeissman I was checking out your blog. Can you recommend a representative post to look at to see if it is of interest to me? I am having a hard time navigating from your front-page of just images.

Joseph Weissman

1:35 AM

Hmm, the topmost post might be interesting? --It's one of my most structured pieces recently (text of a paper given at a conf.)

I like the picture of the broccoflower --one of the most striking natural fractals...

Artem Kaznatcheev

@JosephWeissman this one: fractalontology.wordpress.com/2014/07/16/… ?

Joseph Weissman

Yeah! About revolution and technology.

@ChrisSunami I still want to understand this point about fractal ethics

@ChrisSunami I do know about iterated fractal systems :)

OK good that helps a lot

Joseph Weissman

So -- the point being that moral truths are something like strange attractors in the field of actions?

Maybe that's uncharitable

1:41 AM

no, that's a reasonable first pass

However not moral truths per se but ethical questions

A limited set of well-selected ethical questions can guide the moral development of a community, regardless of how the questions are answered

Joseph Weissman

Hmmm, I wonder about these "ethical questions" :)

Aren't the "solutions" arrived at just pale doubles of these questions, in that case; if they are so determinative?

The ones I use are more like frames of reference -- Universal, personal, social

Is this right universally? Is this right for me? Is this right for society?

Joseph Weissman

Well, I mean, the ordering of the questions is almost half the point :)

It's the difference between left and right, I mean to say

Yes, if you always take them in the same order you get more of a Platonic system which is self similar, but doesn't have a complex structure

Joseph Weissman

The ordering of scales is the question I mean to say

Whether you write your address starting from the universe or yourself

If that makes sense :)

1:46 AM

I think that's the difference between a classical model and a fractal one. In the classical model, it's the order that is important

the direction

from the universal to the personal or vice versa

Joseph Weissman

The fractal ethics seems to point to something scale-free about ethical decisions, but I wonder if we can avoid this directionality, this turbulent flow...

Or rather what it means to stand beyond, above it; according to some "higher" politics

I think that's a good point. In the fractal model, something does not transition from wrong to right just by shifting the scale

I often think that was Marx's key mistake

to think that the large scale violence of a revolution was nobler than the small scale violence of one person against another

Joseph Weissman

Well, I mean -- in passing, I guess -- I think it makes sense to separate revolutionary openings and their consequences (that is: the way established powers shut it back down...)

There's kind of interesting philosophy of history question about this, revolutionary enthusiasm, the effect on spectators to see revolutionary outbursts

Well, in the classical model, you expect to see different behaviors at different levels of scale. But in the fractal model, if it doesn't work on the person to person level, it won't work on the society to society level either

obviously neither viewpoint is completely correct

Joseph Weissman

I mean, I'm not sure how much it makes sense to conflate them

Unless we can demonstrate something scale-free, I guess

1:54 AM

yes. that's been my project for the last several years

Joseph Weissman

(Always interesting to me that Plato had a kind of mathematical cosmogony -- everything is tiny triangles...)

@ChrisSunami Geometry of morals? :)

originally it was a hypothetical, but it seemed that it might be easier to do it than explain it

yes, exactly. I've been looking at ways to actualize it

The current attempt is an art contest focused around groups with a commitment to the community

Joseph Weissman

Cool!

the theory is that if it can work on the local scale, it can be scaled progressively up to the international scale without losing its base characteristics

it's a little early yet to know if it will pan out... we did the first change of scale this year and it wasn't without some big challenges

Joseph Weissman

Tomorrow, the World

Tomorrow, the World! is a 1944 black-and-white motion picture starring Fredric March, Betty Field, and Agnes Moorehead, about a young German boy who had been active in the Hitler youth who comes to live with his uncle in the United States, who tries to teach him to reject Nazism. The film, directed by Leslie Fenton, was based on the successful 1943 Broadway play of the same name. The title comes from Hitler's famous threat: "Today, Germany; tomorrow, the world." == Background == The play Tomorrow, the World opened on Broadway in New York City, New York, USA on 14 April 1943 and closed 17 June 1944...

1:58 AM

:)

Joseph Weissman

Sorry, that was a little darker than intended :)

It is always interesting to see how systems adapt to step changes

Yes. I'm more of a theoretician than a practitioner by nature, but one does what one must

at least if you have a existential outlook you do

Joseph Weissman

Fail again, fail better? :)

I should probably go offline soon but I'd like to stay in touch. I've run across almost no other people who share a background in both philosophy and chaos theory

Joseph Weissman

Definitely! Sounds great, good luck with your work

2:02 AM

I thought my email was listed on my profile here, but I think it only displays to me... unless you can see it as a moderator?

Artem Kaznatcheev

@ChrisSunami he can't use what he sees as a moderator for personal contact.

@ChrisSunami you will have to email him directly

ah. Well it's chris with the domain being kitoba.com

the blog is popculturephilosopher.com although that's a recent relaunch, with very little of my older material

none of the fractal stuff --the explicitly fractal stuff, that is

Joseph Weissman

I'll take a look! (My public email should not be too hard to find)

I didn't see it on your website, but maybe I didn't look hard enough

at any rate, if you want to contact me, you now know how

I enjoyed the conversation tonight

Joseph Weissman

Likewise!!

2:07 AM

and I'm now following you on twitter

by the next time we speak, I hope to have read the Guattari

is this chat weekly?

Joseph Weissman

It is!!

Cool --if I remember, I'll try to check in next week. See you around!

7 hours later…

9:41 AM

@JosephWeissman As a suggestion: Maybe the weekly discussion would have more attendees if it was scheduled for a more consensual time. I just checked and it seems that a good portion of the user active this quarter (like me) are located in Europe. To them (and me) it is scheduled for 3:00 in the morning. So Europe is pretty much excluded from this event.

3 hours later…

Joseph Weissman

1:00 PM

@Einer noted! I'll reschedule it a bit earlier I think... It turned out to be a bit late even in EST

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