shoring up the base
Aug. 30th, 2008 10:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
joculumI have been implored unequivocally by my two-person fan base to post my pieces from the past ten days or so, but I still can't bear to clutter the inboxes of anyone else with them. So this is a compromise. Click if you can stand to do so; three separate posts follow:
Post one, August 24:
I chose not to refer, a few days ago, to the uncovering of a 2006 newspaper in which a “Faith and Values” columnist quoted C. S. Lewis to the effect that “If I have a desire that cannot be satisfied by anything in this world, this suggests I was originally designed to live in some other one.”
Which can lead to conclusions other than the one Lewis thought it ineluctably implied.
And of course not everybody experiences Sehnsucht (the ineffable longing of Romanticism, called that either by Lewis himself or his commentator Corbin Carnell), and Sehnsucht itself seems quite often to be associated with effects of weather that Wallace Stevens described with equal accuracy in “Sunday Morning” while denying any transcendent implications.
Ernst Bloch documented utopian dreamings and deep intuitions of otherness, while insisting that they might be intuitions of possible material outcomes, (“The fact that men have dreamed of angels does not mean that we must refuse to believe in airplane pilots.”)
These thoughts, which I’ve expressed many times before, are stirred by the reprise of “The Gnomon Show” at Railroad Earth in which physicist David Finkelstein re-presented Albrecht Dürer’s dismissal of the neo-Platonic universe (versus the empiricist universe Dürer allegorizes in “Melencolia I”). Finkelstein accused Einstein and others of being re-infected by the neo-Platonic “ontovirus,” and he ended his remarks with “The world is not a message to be read or a riddle to be solved. It is”...originally, he had added “a system to be lived in,” an ecological whole without evident meaning, but on the advice of his estimable wife, he ended the sentence as I have written it. It is.
And my part of the multimedia art event presented…something else, as the painter Cecil Collins’ “The Vision of the Fool” might have seen it. But neo-Platonism collides always with the material dreams of Bloch and Stevens, and Sehnsucht depends on a gently changing wind and cloudy weather, or on the glint of firelight on old metallic objects. And always, the response of those who are otherwise minded is, “Huh?”
Only those who live in the self-enclosed world of the Oxford don or the lone Romantic can think otherwise, can imagine that all men (and all women, or else all women and all men) surely feel the same way.
But of course both sides in any argument feel, and sometimes say outright, that anyone who doesn’t have this or that specific experience (or, alternately, who doesn’t recognize that the experience is stuff and nonsense) is someone who isn’t even worth arguing with.
Post two, August 24:
I associate National Public Radio with a simple but modestly sophisticated style of life; with kitchens where meals are prepared that don’t require enormous budgets, but do require skill, good taste, and imagination or access to new cookbooks plus family tradition. Homegrown or heirloom tomatoes optional according to season and region.
This may be why I tend to acquire my NPR in fragments on the car radio or infrequent conscious efforts to have the radio on during news broadcasts or Garrison Keillor’s weekly evocation of Lake Wobegon, so obviously based on the hometown of my aunts and uncles.
So it is revealing that nobody bothered to tell me that my energetic belated discovery of neuroplasticity had been rendered even more embarrassingly superfluous by the May 7 edition of “The Infinite Mind” ---- a tenth anniversary revisiting of the topic under the title “Rewiring the Brain.”
It means none of my relatives and few of my onetime classmates are reading this, which is as I suspected.
Given the sheer quantity of such haute vulgarization (a term I owe to utopyr), it surprises me that there is not more discussion that places our longest-running questions into popular contexts. Maybe there is, and everyone is too embarrassed to tell me, or else my minimal readership is too elevated to engage in such middlebrow intellectual pursuit and therefore don’t know anything about crossdisciplinary conversation as engaged in by the broad masses of thinking men and women.
I discovered the August 23 rebroadcast of “Rewiring the Brain” because I had tuned in at an ungodly hour of the morning to learn the denouement of Obama’s successful week-long psywar campaign to make us pay attention to who he picked as his candidate for vice president. It was a brilliantly handled piece of old-fashioned behavioral modification.
Post three, August 28:
We have such trouble tracking multiplicity.
We have enough trouble just understanding it, most of the time.
It’s why I wish Obama had spent the summer devising TV ads that said, “Things are not good out there. You and I know they need to change. I have plans to do that, and I can tell you why they’ll work. Here are just a few of ‘em. You tell me what else you want to know, and I’ll give you the facts.”
. . . .
It is our inclination to think of things in compartments, and to want one-syllable answers to questions that don’t interest us, that lead us to overlook the obvious.
One obvious thing being the fact that subtle evidence often reveals nothing whatsoever. John Stone wrote a poem once about the extent to which medical symptoms never rule out possible alternate causes, or multiple causes, so that the only thing to do is to begin a course of treatment and ask for “further tests.”
A lovely short story in a mid-70s issue of boundary 2 (the one that contained my review essay on “Nathan Scott and the Problem of a Postmodern Ethics”) detailed the possible events and consequent causal explanations behind the initial perception “Your wife walks briskly through the door, smiles, and sets down a bag of groceries.”
The upshot of the story was that you were better off not making up alternative explanations for what might have been happening before that.
And I have come to that conclusion repeatedly over the course of this journal, except that some of us cannot seem to get that through our heads.
Things that lead to practical action are worth pursuing in depth; it matters whether speculators have intensified the effects of normal supply-and-demand forces driving up the price of oil, and if they have, not necessarily by design, then it would be good to draft legislation to stop it. But it is hard to track the accidental rather than intentional consequences of financial speculation.
It’s like everyone rushing to one side of an overloaded boat and capsizing it; all you can do to prevent this is calculate how much shifting weight will overturn a vessel displacing so many feet of water, and prohibit loading it with that much weight in terms of number of passengers.
But social engineering is subject to more variables than physical engineering. People will stagger on board with bags heavier than lead, and then some event will send them all to the same side of the little craft.
Given the complexity of human motives and human societies, at any given moment there probably are more schemes and intents in operation than we think. But if we tried to map out what all of them are, we would never get anything done.
Heck, we could spend a month studying the mixed motives in Bill Clinton’s speech to the Democratic convention, but it wouldn’t change a thing about the upcoming election.
I do tend to spend too much time mapping out the statistical likelihood of alternative explanations for things, and comments in this journal have rightly made fun of me for doing so, although just as often they have missed the point.
. . . .
I have forgotten the details of Hans Vaihinger’s philosophy of heuristic fictions, in that antique volume translated from German as The Philosophy of “As-if.” But I believe Vaihinger took the extreme position that all of our supposed truths are actually fictions that allow us to get things done. Thus we might as well just look for the fictions that do the best job of getting done what we need to get done (explaining how the world works being one such job to be done). There are times (only times? Vaihinger would have said, always) when it is better all round to accept that one has no means of knowing what is really going on.
So regardless of the reason for it—probably normal processes of accident and randomness—I am thankful that on the morning of my long-scheduled first encounter with a diagnostic procedure, the New York Times published a first-person account that set forth the details of the procedure and all the conclusions that can follow from the data gathered therein. It allowed for a much less anxiety-laden day than otherwise, since this is what the labs don’t bother to explain. (“You are going to be stuck twelve times with a thin needle. This is what we hope to find out.”—information available on the internet, but only if you remember to look for it, which I didn’t)
I suggest that you ask yourself what leapt to mind when you read that, as to which ridiculous conclusions I drew from the event. “Aha, the dumb ass thinks the universe is [such and such]…which nobody but a damn fool would believe.”
I know all the conclusions I wished I could draw, but there isn’t evidence to make any of them, including random accident, more than a statistically more or less probable faith-proposition.
However, some of the faith-propositions are so improbable as to be dismissed on the grounds of overwhelming contrary evidence. They aren’t all equal. Some of the more disprovable wish-fulfillments have been making large sums of money for the authors of books presenting the evidence that they work. And maybe they do, once in a blue moon, thanks to factors we don’t yet understand.
Which particular error about the universe you choose most often to ridicule may tell you something useful about yourself. Or, of course, it may not.
We seem to be wired to jump to conclusions about what is or is not true, including the nature of the daggumed-fool beliefs that our less enlightened brethren have about the world.
Post one, August 24:
I chose not to refer, a few days ago, to the uncovering of a 2006 newspaper in which a “Faith and Values” columnist quoted C. S. Lewis to the effect that “If I have a desire that cannot be satisfied by anything in this world, this suggests I was originally designed to live in some other one.”
Which can lead to conclusions other than the one Lewis thought it ineluctably implied.
And of course not everybody experiences Sehnsucht (the ineffable longing of Romanticism, called that either by Lewis himself or his commentator Corbin Carnell), and Sehnsucht itself seems quite often to be associated with effects of weather that Wallace Stevens described with equal accuracy in “Sunday Morning” while denying any transcendent implications.
Ernst Bloch documented utopian dreamings and deep intuitions of otherness, while insisting that they might be intuitions of possible material outcomes, (“The fact that men have dreamed of angels does not mean that we must refuse to believe in airplane pilots.”)
These thoughts, which I’ve expressed many times before, are stirred by the reprise of “The Gnomon Show” at Railroad Earth in which physicist David Finkelstein re-presented Albrecht Dürer’s dismissal of the neo-Platonic universe (versus the empiricist universe Dürer allegorizes in “Melencolia I”). Finkelstein accused Einstein and others of being re-infected by the neo-Platonic “ontovirus,” and he ended his remarks with “The world is not a message to be read or a riddle to be solved. It is”...originally, he had added “a system to be lived in,” an ecological whole without evident meaning, but on the advice of his estimable wife, he ended the sentence as I have written it. It is.
And my part of the multimedia art event presented…something else, as the painter Cecil Collins’ “The Vision of the Fool” might have seen it. But neo-Platonism collides always with the material dreams of Bloch and Stevens, and Sehnsucht depends on a gently changing wind and cloudy weather, or on the glint of firelight on old metallic objects. And always, the response of those who are otherwise minded is, “Huh?”
Only those who live in the self-enclosed world of the Oxford don or the lone Romantic can think otherwise, can imagine that all men (and all women, or else all women and all men) surely feel the same way.
But of course both sides in any argument feel, and sometimes say outright, that anyone who doesn’t have this or that specific experience (or, alternately, who doesn’t recognize that the experience is stuff and nonsense) is someone who isn’t even worth arguing with.
Post two, August 24:
I associate National Public Radio with a simple but modestly sophisticated style of life; with kitchens where meals are prepared that don’t require enormous budgets, but do require skill, good taste, and imagination or access to new cookbooks plus family tradition. Homegrown or heirloom tomatoes optional according to season and region.
This may be why I tend to acquire my NPR in fragments on the car radio or infrequent conscious efforts to have the radio on during news broadcasts or Garrison Keillor’s weekly evocation of Lake Wobegon, so obviously based on the hometown of my aunts and uncles.
So it is revealing that nobody bothered to tell me that my energetic belated discovery of neuroplasticity had been rendered even more embarrassingly superfluous by the May 7 edition of “The Infinite Mind” ---- a tenth anniversary revisiting of the topic under the title “Rewiring the Brain.”
It means none of my relatives and few of my onetime classmates are reading this, which is as I suspected.
Given the sheer quantity of such haute vulgarization (a term I owe to utopyr), it surprises me that there is not more discussion that places our longest-running questions into popular contexts. Maybe there is, and everyone is too embarrassed to tell me, or else my minimal readership is too elevated to engage in such middlebrow intellectual pursuit and therefore don’t know anything about crossdisciplinary conversation as engaged in by the broad masses of thinking men and women.
I discovered the August 23 rebroadcast of “Rewiring the Brain” because I had tuned in at an ungodly hour of the morning to learn the denouement of Obama’s successful week-long psywar campaign to make us pay attention to who he picked as his candidate for vice president. It was a brilliantly handled piece of old-fashioned behavioral modification.
Post three, August 28:
We have such trouble tracking multiplicity.
We have enough trouble just understanding it, most of the time.
It’s why I wish Obama had spent the summer devising TV ads that said, “Things are not good out there. You and I know they need to change. I have plans to do that, and I can tell you why they’ll work. Here are just a few of ‘em. You tell me what else you want to know, and I’ll give you the facts.”
. . . .
It is our inclination to think of things in compartments, and to want one-syllable answers to questions that don’t interest us, that lead us to overlook the obvious.
One obvious thing being the fact that subtle evidence often reveals nothing whatsoever. John Stone wrote a poem once about the extent to which medical symptoms never rule out possible alternate causes, or multiple causes, so that the only thing to do is to begin a course of treatment and ask for “further tests.”
A lovely short story in a mid-70s issue of boundary 2 (the one that contained my review essay on “Nathan Scott and the Problem of a Postmodern Ethics”) detailed the possible events and consequent causal explanations behind the initial perception “Your wife walks briskly through the door, smiles, and sets down a bag of groceries.”
The upshot of the story was that you were better off not making up alternative explanations for what might have been happening before that.
And I have come to that conclusion repeatedly over the course of this journal, except that some of us cannot seem to get that through our heads.
Things that lead to practical action are worth pursuing in depth; it matters whether speculators have intensified the effects of normal supply-and-demand forces driving up the price of oil, and if they have, not necessarily by design, then it would be good to draft legislation to stop it. But it is hard to track the accidental rather than intentional consequences of financial speculation.
It’s like everyone rushing to one side of an overloaded boat and capsizing it; all you can do to prevent this is calculate how much shifting weight will overturn a vessel displacing so many feet of water, and prohibit loading it with that much weight in terms of number of passengers.
But social engineering is subject to more variables than physical engineering. People will stagger on board with bags heavier than lead, and then some event will send them all to the same side of the little craft.
Given the complexity of human motives and human societies, at any given moment there probably are more schemes and intents in operation than we think. But if we tried to map out what all of them are, we would never get anything done.
Heck, we could spend a month studying the mixed motives in Bill Clinton’s speech to the Democratic convention, but it wouldn’t change a thing about the upcoming election.
I do tend to spend too much time mapping out the statistical likelihood of alternative explanations for things, and comments in this journal have rightly made fun of me for doing so, although just as often they have missed the point.
. . . .
I have forgotten the details of Hans Vaihinger’s philosophy of heuristic fictions, in that antique volume translated from German as The Philosophy of “As-if.” But I believe Vaihinger took the extreme position that all of our supposed truths are actually fictions that allow us to get things done. Thus we might as well just look for the fictions that do the best job of getting done what we need to get done (explaining how the world works being one such job to be done). There are times (only times? Vaihinger would have said, always) when it is better all round to accept that one has no means of knowing what is really going on.
So regardless of the reason for it—probably normal processes of accident and randomness—I am thankful that on the morning of my long-scheduled first encounter with a diagnostic procedure, the New York Times published a first-person account that set forth the details of the procedure and all the conclusions that can follow from the data gathered therein. It allowed for a much less anxiety-laden day than otherwise, since this is what the labs don’t bother to explain. (“You are going to be stuck twelve times with a thin needle. This is what we hope to find out.”—information available on the internet, but only if you remember to look for it, which I didn’t)
I suggest that you ask yourself what leapt to mind when you read that, as to which ridiculous conclusions I drew from the event. “Aha, the dumb ass thinks the universe is [such and such]…which nobody but a damn fool would believe.”
I know all the conclusions I wished I could draw, but there isn’t evidence to make any of them, including random accident, more than a statistically more or less probable faith-proposition.
However, some of the faith-propositions are so improbable as to be dismissed on the grounds of overwhelming contrary evidence. They aren’t all equal. Some of the more disprovable wish-fulfillments have been making large sums of money for the authors of books presenting the evidence that they work. And maybe they do, once in a blue moon, thanks to factors we don’t yet understand.
Which particular error about the universe you choose most often to ridicule may tell you something useful about yourself. Or, of course, it may not.
We seem to be wired to jump to conclusions about what is or is not true, including the nature of the daggumed-fool beliefs that our less enlightened brethren have about the world.
