English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

Joseph Weissman

00:00

Light. The heart of the enlightenment is being able to direct this light in novel directions. But this is maybe poorly understood.

So let's say that the question is again what science means, what the knowledge of science means.

Because, for a scientist anyway, it isn't a matter of simple faith in science as such; it is a strategic evaluation of our continuously-varying degrees of confidence in various experimental methodologies and results and so on.

Existentially, I think this is often coupled with a higher narcissism, a faith in science as such, as a force in the world and history.

Cerberus

@JosephWeissman I'm not sure what you mean here, except that any form of organisation naturally gives rise to its own set of problems.

Joseph Weissman

I think any simple reading of science as a force in the world has to take into account this larger and more complicated question the "meaning" of science we have been talking about.

Cerberus

@JosephWeissman This will be true in certain cases, but not in others.

Joseph Weissman

@Cerberus that's definitely one very good way to put it here: the very givens of our conditions are problematic, before they have an essence, before they are defined.

This is the heart of existentialism to me, the secret of existence preceding essence: the infinite possibility and value of a life

Cerberus

Hmm.

Now that is very broad.

Joseph Weissman

00:05

I'm reminded of how Sartre criticizes pacifists.

Cerberus

I didn't know he did.

Joseph Weissman

He basically says that if you could go back in time, before the oppressive regime of history had begun...

Cerberus

(...which is never...)

Joseph Weissman

then perhaps your "good" thoughts of non-violence might mean something, because you could have potentially intervened to change it.

Cerberus

Unless you count oppression by an organisation as fundamentally different from any other kind of human oppression.

Joseph Weissman

00:06

But within the violent regime that exists -- Sartre is very brutal here -- within this regime, your thoughts of non-violence are essentially compromised, effectively a way of supporting oppression.

Cerberus

You could say that. A classical anti-Kantian position.

Joseph Weissman

It may help to see some of the context here in which he blasts pacficists as collaborators, too -- this is also the burning heart of Sartre's antifascism. (Regarding the evil of Hitler's policies and Germany's occupation of France as "collaboration", etc.)

Cerberus

Right.

"Inaction is not fundamentally different from action."

Joseph Weissman

Again, I would just want to bring us back to this central point I have been trying to argue for: the critical "cultural" question -- the one that effectively critiques -- is the one that asks what voice speaks through your position, your argument, your discipline, your discourse, etc.

It's an effectively Nietzschean question, mobilized here in such a militant way by Sartre.

And it's not about "you" or "me" -- I'm sorry to have framed it implicitly like that. It's a general problem of what force or spirit is expressing itself through a voice, a way of thinking or living, etc.

Cerberus

I'm not sure I see a direct link between Sartre's position here and the question "how should we define science?".

Joseph Weissman

00:13

The problem of voices is general -- what's speaking through science? Who or what is seeing through the perfect-observer-lenses science makes of a human being?

A cold machine, or monster.

Cerberus

Can't it be "noöne", in certain respects?

The lens just is.

Joseph Weissman

(Nietzsche remarks somewhere that the state is the "coldest monster" somewhere...)

Very zen :)

Cerberus

I know right!

Joseph Weissman

In a way it is the ethical question, and it links Nietzsche directly with Spinoza: what spirit does one express in their way of thinking and living?

Spinoza says very clearly how the despot and the priest are linked in their use of guilt-inducing sad passions to diminish our power of acting.

Cerberus

I'm still having trouble with these words "spirit" and "voice". They confuse me. I don't get an imagine or a pattern that I recognise when I hear them.

How does a despot induce guilt?

Joseph Weissman

00:17

Nietzsche explains somewhere the dual origin of sin and debt -- it's an interesting thought.

So spirits and voices.

Cerberus

How does that work?

In religion, I understand the connection/parallel.

Joseph Weissman

I'm not sure I'll do a great job sketching it here, but I can try to unpack it a bit.

It's a weird and almost historical argument he makes, though it's metaphorical to some degree.

TRiG

3

A: Compose and comprise

The usage you question is definitely a usage that is frequently criticized. "Grammar Girl" Mignon Fogarty writes: most grammar sources I checked (2, 3, 4) agree that ‘is comprised of’ is an incorrect phrase. She cites many of the usual suspects in schoolmarm-style prescriptive rules of thi...

Cerberus

I would say committing a sin causes a kind of debt to exist or be felt.

TRiG

How does @nohat manage to be so consistently awesome?

Joseph Weissman

00:20

Sure, that's the basic idea I think.

Guilt comes from the internalization of this painful couplet -- punishment and pain linked together.

Cerberus

Even if you're not sure whether you have committed a sin, you will display an attitude somewhat akin to being in debt or trying to build credit just in case.

Joseph Weissman

They become involved through a regime of cruelty.

Cerberus

@TRiG He is certainly thorough!

Joseph Weissman

(There is a continual existential horror in human culture because of this basic cruelty and violence that comprises our existence.)

Cerberus

I suppose.

Joseph Weissman

00:21

Because we can define ourselves, we are thrown from inexistence into this nonsense.

Very popular point of view among teenagers :)

Cerberus

@JosephWeissman I don't understand this.

I feel like every other line I type is a question!

Isn't it?

Joseph Weissman

I'm sorry if I'm distracted or moving at a strange rhythm :)

Cerberus

That's OK.

Joseph Weissman

I'm a little jet-lagged I think. I hope some of this was actually constructive.

Cerberus

Absolutely.

Just many metaphors and theories I am not intimately familiar with.

Very interesting.

Joseph Weissman

00:24

Sartre says our existence precedes our essence.

Cerberus

Precedes in what way?

There I go again.

Joseph Weissman

Metaphysically, right?

It's ontology again. About the basic 'sub-structure' of reality.

Things exist before they have essences. Lives exist, thoughts exist.

Cerberus

I always have trouble with such metaphysical models.

Joseph Weissman

Humans discover their essences, their voices, their spirit.

Cerberus

I doubt their meaningfulness.

Joseph Weissman

00:25

We dramatize them, we play them.

Ethics consists in evaluating these "actings-out" of spiritual and natural forces, which to to say, considering the value of different ways of acting, thinking, etc.

Morality, a transcendent good-evil distinction, does not need to enter here.

It's just about machines: what is a machine good for?, what can it do? -- whether a thought, a life, a cosmos

Cerberus

"Value" - "morality": how are they different? A transcendent good-evil distinction is I think not something many wise men harbour.

Joseph Weissman

On a social or psychic level, "existence-precedes-essence" can be read to mean that we could discover different ways of thinking and living together, we could define intimate and global relationships in new ways

Cerberus

Does anyone really assign the same "value" to the use of machines as to the ego?

@JosephWeissman Okay, and how would this work?

Joseph Weissman

I don't want to have to bring out Adorno again :)

Cerberus

Heh.

Joseph Weissman

00:29

But that's exactly the question!

(The fact that we can even ask this basically demonstrates it.)

The radical openness, the infinite possibility inherent in most social interactions also shows this.

Cerberus

I have to be a radical empiricist here, but to me a theory only gets meaning from the concrete.

Joseph Weissman

The way an open conversation can't really be exhaustively planned

Cerberus

Without it, I don't know what the theory means.

Joseph Weissman

They're intimately connected

Guattari says somewhere the flesh of the sublime and the material of sensation are inextricably interwoven

Cerberus

@JosephWeissman And we were trying so hard! Or were we...

Joseph Weissman

00:32

Redefining psychic and social relationships as we wish, right? That's the chance, the oppourtunity, the risk afforded to human beings.

Being able to define new relationships to oneself and relationships to the world -- and so this inflects science, art, philosophy.

When a scientist creates functions he does so in a world in which, at the very least, he exists.

And science too has an existence that precedes its essence, and so on :)

Cerberus

This sounds like cogito ergo sum!

Joseph Weissman

Precisely! And it's almost even a schizo-cogito -- a broken or fractal cogito

Cogito for the modern subject -- at the intersection of a multiplicity of disjoint and discordant worlds

In passing, I would bring in Spinoza here again briefly.

We don't the limits of what a body, a life, a thought are.

Cerberus

I would phrase it like this. If you think you know nothing except that you can think, then you're just not seeing the meta-level, you're not seeing the vastness of your own prejudices.

Joseph Weissman

(We don't know the limits of what a feeling, a moment, a world, a life, etc. could be.)

Cerberus

Indeed not.

Joseph Weissman

00:35

Let's talk about Descartes for a bit.

You know he came up with the cogito as a consequence of his travels?

Mitch

@TRiG I think he actually knows things.

Joseph Weissman

This brings us right back to where we started.

Cerberus

Hmm I don't remember precisely.

Joseph Weissman

A multiplicity of laws and values reflecting the multiplicity of peoples he encountered.

Cerberus

I know he went through different phases.

Joseph Weissman

00:37

The cogito is spoken from the madness of trying to reconcile these incompossible universes.

Cerberus

Incompossible?

Joseph Weissman

The idea is that it works not only when the world is false like the matrix, but when a much deeper problem has happened --

Cerberus

That cannot both be possible?

Joseph Weissman

That you have become insane, that falsehood and perversity have crept into the structure and content of your mind

The cogito is basically a neurotic answer to schizophrenic in this sense

"Even if everything is false, even if falsehood has crept into the contents of my mind, I still think, I think, therefore I am"

The madness at the heart of the insight may be hard to see at first.

Cerberus

@JosephWeissman This I think is a very basic an important concept. Many people don't fully realise it or apply it.

Joseph Weissman

00:39

Given of course there is a simple irony to the solution: we are founding all knowledge... on the very paranoia about knowing anything whatsoever

Cerberus

@JosephWeissman It is self-denying.

@JosephWeissman But how can one found anything on that?

I don't think that is what we do.

Joseph Weissman

That's the point! That's the problem with science

It relies on a stable, identifiable subject and a cosmos that plays by rules

Cerberus

We rather posit a couple of axioms.

Joseph Weissman

It doesn't permit absolute contingency, in its "heart" as it were

Cerberus

Indeed not.

Joseph Weissman

00:40

It refuses schizophrenia even as it recognizes it as empirical fact -- which is to say, the cosmos is simply forces, flows -- virtual and actual machines

Cerberus

But a good scientist understand this.

Joseph Weissman

Absolutely. They know very well... and yet...

We are back at psychoanalysis.

Cerberus

There may not be many, though.

Joseph Weissman

It is a higher and rarer "science" that understanding this in depth would give rise to.

Nietzsche speaks rapturously of a coming "joyous science" which would reunite the currently diverted, stunted and immature disciplines of art and science

Reuniting human and natural sciences would not be a bad start.

They're more connected than their topological separation on many campuses might suggest :)

Cerberus

It may not be necessary for many forms of research. I also feel that some scientists just let the schizophrenia push them a little more into the right direction (of aporia) when they are forced to, when they realise there are some inconsistencies in their theories; but they only go so far as they need to for that particular research item. And perhaps they don't really need to...

@JosephWeissman Connected, yes...but how would you describe the typical difference between the two?

And do you see social science as a human or a natural science?

Joseph Weissman

00:45

We urgently need to schizophrenize discourses and disciplines. This is how I think we have to understand philosophy -- as the "practice" of creating concepts.

Cerberus

It is difficult. And perhaps not always necessary to advance certain areas of research.

Joseph Weissman

How to measure the distance between the human and natural sciences?

Cerberus

I have two ideas.

Joseph Weissman

It would be seem to be an infinite or insurmountable chasm; at any rate, (traversing) it is still not something done trivially.

Cerberus

1. The humanities are about man as a subject. The sciences are about anything as an object, including man himself.

Joseph Weissman

00:49

Given the specificity of the axiom, I'd be curious what you might make of Graham Harmon's "object-oriented philosophy" :)

Object-oriented ontology

Object-oriented ontology (OOO) is a metaphysical movement that rejects the privileging of human existence over the existence of nonhuman objects. Specifically, object-oriented ontology opposes the anthropocentrism of Immanuel Kant's Copernican Revolution, whereby objects are said to conform to the mind of the subject and, in turn, become products of human cognition. In contrast to Kant's view, object-oriented philosophers maintain that objects exist independently of human perception and are not ontologically exhausted by their relations with humans or other objects. Thus, for object-orie...

Cerberus

2. The science deal with discrete concepts: quantities, discrete steps of reasoning; whereas the humanities deal with far more complex systems, but that they do not need to understand in as much detail. If I study a text, I don't need to provide every single step in my argumentation why it was probably inspired by another text.

Joseph Weissman

(Sorry, didn't mean to interrupt your enumeration!)

Cerberus

Heh.

Joseph Weissman

I disagree with (2) on principle.

I don't think science, art or philosophy is any harder or easier, any more or less difficult than each another

Or any less careful, rigorous, etc

I do get what you're saying though -- don't let me break the list again either, were there more axioms? :D

Cerberus

@JosephWeissman Neither do I, not more or less difficult nor more or less rigorous: just a different method.

Joseph Weissman

00:52

Creation a concept is no more or less difficult than creating a function or a composition of affects

Certainly different -- but related, too! They each voyage to that chaos we were talking about... and come back with variadic treasures: variables for the scientist, variations for art, variances for philosophy

Creation, not discovery. This is more or less where you brought up analysis earlier, I think.

Saying it's effectively uncreative.

Cerberus

You could look at me and try to analyse the biological works of my body. Or make an inventory of all my atoms and other particles. Then you could predict certain things about me. You would use numbers and calculations. You would be precise and objective.

Joseph Weissman

Reminds me of what Freud says about the dream work -- that it's uncreative, that it simply "blindly" translates.

Cerberus

On the other hand, you could talk to me, read books about people like me. Then you could also predict certain things about me.

Joseph Weissman

Okay, I've got two good models of Cerberus.

Cerberus

Yes.

In the second model, it would be much harder to precisely repeat the steps you took and communicate them to another researcher.

Your brain is doing all sorts of subconscious stuff that makes you feel sure or unsure about the various arguments you weigh.

Joseph Weissman

00:56

Sure. This seems difference the difference between coding for a solution and using a neural network to evolve a solution.

The "pseudo-organic" neural network is going to be way more effective at capturing "qualitative" dimensions of the problem in a robust way than human code is likely to be.

Cerberus

As in, a neural network whose steps you cannot fully predict or comprehend?

Joseph Weissman

Well, maybe not "exactly."

:D

Cerberus

Heh.

Right.

Joseph Weissman

But that's kind of the point? They're not exact methods. They're not rational.

They're organic, stored in neural architecture like ours. Fractally.

They're multiplicities, brains. They evolve solutions like we do.

Cerberus

Yeah, well, I don't know about rational; but "not exact" is precisely what I mean.

That's why we speak of the exact sciences.

It is I believe more common in Dutch.

In English, it is a bit of a pleonasm?

Joseph Weissman

00:59

Interesting. You do hear it occasionally :)

Well, the thought was really just these neural networks become screens for data. Like those eyes scientists become; neural networks are our eyes for raw data.

Cerberus

But I think the degree of exactness in their methods could be a defining property of humanities v. sciences.

Joseph Weissman

I worry there's another paradox lurking here, that of clarity: so we might have -- clear but inexact, confused but exact :)

Cerberus

Hmm what does clarity mean here?

Joseph Weissman

(Or vice versa, of course.)

In a way this goes back to light.

Illumination. But also naming that which we are before we are organized into bodies, societies. The material of infinite potential.

Cerberus

I'm still not sure what to do with that.

Joseph Weissman

01:03

What is clarity? There are two kinds, at least. I would want to distinguish between reactionary clarity (paranoia/neurosis) and revolutionary clarity (militant/schizophrenic).

Cerberus

Uhh...

Joseph Weissman

Um?

:D

Cerberus

Hehe.

Joseph Weissman

Clarity is a danger, in other words.

Remind's me of Lacan -- anxiety is the knife's edge between pleasure and jouissance.

Cerberus

@JosephWeissman I have no idea what you mean here.

Joseph Weissman

01:05

Clarity blesses us, right? It cures stupidity, or at least falling for the worst fictions/mystifications

Cerberus

Clarity as in simply understanding, seeing the truth?

Joseph Weissman

Taking it piously, becoming reactionary -- playing guilty conscience and judge -- this is one danger of clarity

Sure. I swear I'm trying to stick pretty close to primary senses of words here :)

Cerberus

He...clarity just doesn't have a very clear primary sense to me.

Joseph Weissman

Clarity can also show us too much, right?

Excessive, dangerous intrusion of intolerable truths

Cerberus

How?

Joseph Weissman

01:07

Nietzsche is a master formulator of truths that are impossible to live with, but impossible to ignore without intellectual dishonesty

Cerberus

How are those bad?

Joseph Weissman

How what?

Cerberus

Or do you mean they are scary but good?

Joseph Weissman

They're each dangers, in the sense that they're a risk: you can't know whether the break will be a breakdown or breakthrough

Cerberus

A breakdown?

Are you talking about someone's subconscious attitude?

Joseph Weissman

01:09

Exposure to the radical outside can be fatal; similar to the risk of involution by narcissism.

The ego fractured or subverted from within.

It's definitely about the spontaneous processes of the subconscious, sure.

Cerberus

All right.

Joseph Weissman

When we're talking about the subject, desire, becoming -- one point would simply be that these are very real. Desire produces something, it causes something to come about.

What's more -- desires directly invest collective and social fields and forces. They're immediately political.

Deleuze and Guatarri say somewhere that politics precedes ontology.

Cerberus

I'm not sure I understand and see the relations between all this.

Joseph Weissman

In particular, this is true of computer science; this is a point they make in the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus (the last line is from a later chapter.)

That so much of C.S. is built around arborescent structures -- trees -- rather than rhizomes, or networks. This is certainly changing today, in a big way; you could say the high-tech fields are so networked they're making everything else networked

What more could be done in this direction? The challenge there strikes me as basically how to make a computer a brain

Cerberus

@JosephWeissman So do you mean as in a code that resembles a network?

Joseph Weissman

01:16

Exactly. We know today really more or less how to do this -- with neural networks.

But there's more than just networking itself -- one question would be about the structure of the networks; another might be about the other systems in which they participate

But the hierarchichal, tree-like structures that still seem to linger in our software are interesting

Some bright computer scientist pointed out that the architecture of software is going to ultimately mirror the organizational and communicational structures of the organizations producing it

Cerberus

Not of the human brain?

Joseph Weissman

(In passing, every sufficiently complicated program effectively has an internal language which it uses to describe the world or its domain of operation)

Cerberus

Or does that count as an organisation?

Joseph Weissman

Definitely. What organizes the brain is the entire question.

Light is about freedom. Creating free men -- as Deleuze says, those capable of recognizing the difference between the aims of culture and those of the state, the church, capital, etc.

Cerberus

I don't see the connection between what you said about networks, brains, and the bit about the aims of culture.

Joseph Weissman

01:21

Defining problems for ourselves. Learning. A life.

Neural networks would be the ultimate "subject-supposed-to-know"

We don't even precisely understand "how" they work, simply that they do -- we can set them up and manipulate them, but once they're running they take on an "organic" sophistication that's almost infinitely more robust and rich and complex than code to solve the problem that a human could write

This works well for certain classes of problems. Including simulating consciousness, which gets us back into metaphysics, of course -- but I'll try to keep it to a minimum. We should probably start winding down :)

One question would be about the ways in which these "virtual brains" are going to be used. I think there are definitely ethical questions there.

The nature of our civilization would seem to imply a pretty brutal exploitation of these sorts of pseudo-organic systems, at least in the short term.

Cerberus

@JosephWeissman Right, I agree.

@JosephWeissman I don't know...there already are various science-fiction films and series where artificial intelligence is accorded human rights.

Joseph Weissman

Okay, so I'm starving. If you're around in a bit, maybe we can continue this? Unless I've exhausted you with my silliness.

Cerberus

Haha.

Not at all!

The only thing is that I might be in bed by the time you return.

Joseph Weissman

Understood. Either way, thanks so much for your patience with me.

This was really fun.

Cerberus

The question about how we should approach artificial intelligence is certainly interesting. It clearly shows the relativity of human existence and of human morality, for those who have not already seen it.

@JosephWeissman It was!

Laters!

Robusto

01:47

@Cerberus Somehow discussions about AI aren't the same without Vitaly listening in. And more.

Cerberus

@Robusto He couldn't bear it.

He is a very exact thinker.

Robusto

Yeah.

Cerberus

I wonder what he's up to these days.

We could invade the LW chat channel sometime...

It's sort of fun there.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

02:54

hey, @nohat is here!

but sleeping, I guess

Sonic The Hedgehog

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Hey.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@SonicTheHedgehog sonic! haven't seen you around in a while

Sonic The Hedgehog

Yeah. :) Doing homework right now, though.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

me too, if I can be permitted to by "homework" mean "work work"

hm, that sentence feels awkward

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English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…