Eh! Ingegnere! Aspetti! Che cosa fa!

New Year

2010-01-02T02:18:09Z

My sentiments about the passage of time, aging, calendar demarcations, etc. would be more interesting if New Orleans didn't live up to its reputation so well.

News

2009-12-30T06:09:47Z

Tomorrow I'm getting a flight to New Orleans, which is a magical city by all accounts. I'll spend the New Years weekend there with Zach, Alpha Male, Evacuee Nick, and a few others who were on the Tunisia trip a while back.

Had a fine time with the nuclear family over the holidays. Because of my sister, I've been watching Buffy. It's ok, but not as good as Firefly. Among other things, I find it completely unconvincing whenver Buffy has a personal crisis over feeling unattractive. I mean, really? I get that this makes her relatable to many people. It also makes her delusional.

I caught up on my correspondence today, primarily with Joshua the Poet but also several others. Over some meal in the past week Mom brought up some radio guest who was complaining that emailed letters don't have the same depth to them as the handwritten letters of old. I found this a bewildering claim, given that I find myself regularly oversharing my psychic toiling by email, often in lengthy dialogue with others doing the same. I guess some people just don't breathe this stuff the same way.

In preparation for New Orleans and because it was independently recommended by several people within a short period of time, I am reading A Confederacy of Dunces and recommend it to anybody reading this.

Q: Seriously, how great are the Bernstein Tapes? A: Really great. The one I picked out at random, with Creon and Antigone illustrating the Forgiveness and Confession section, has already changed the way I look at accountability and confession. And I thought it was all just cultishness and hype!

All things considered, 2009 was an awesome year for growth and was also intrinsically pretty sweet. I am looking forward to 2010.

Oh, right

2009-12-25T17:38:40Z

Hey, Merry Christmas, everyone.

The Book of Discipline

2009-12-25T04:48:52Z

I haven't been to church, and especially the church of my childhood, for a long time, but I went with my family today for the Christmas Eve service. I got there early because my parents and sister were rehearsing with the choir. I went off to hide in the church library, intending to read a novel, but I first started looking at the bookshelf and something caught my eye: the Book of Discipline.

I had never heard of it. I discovered quickly that the Book of Discipline is not an S&M manual, but instead is the official document of the United Methodist's denominational laws, bylaws, theological principles, social creeds, and organizational guidelines.

It is fascinating.

It also provoked deep sympathies in me. Though never confronted with the document directly, I spent a lot of my early life in an environment and culture inspired by it. So I shouldn't be surprised to find so many of the principles as core to my personality, however the interpretation and stylings may change over time.

Take the first page I flipped to at random, which had a section titled "Our Theological Task":

Our theological task is both critical and constructive. It is critical in that we test various expressions of faith by asking: Are they true? Appropriate? Clear? Cogent? Credible? Are they based on love? Do they provide the Church and its members with a witness that is faithful to the gospel as reflected in our living heritage and that is authentic and convincing in the light of human experience and the present state of human knowledge?

Our theological task is constructive in that every generation must appropriate creatively the wisdom of the past and seek God in their midst in order to think afresh about God, revelation, sin, redemption, worship, the church, freedom, justice, moral responsibility, and other significant theological concerns. Our summons is to understand and receive the gospel promises in our troubled and uncertain times.

And later in that same section, an explicit pragmatism, which further reading of the Book of Discipline showed pervades United Methodist doctrine:

Our theological task is essentially practical. It informs the individual’s daily decisions and serves the Church’s life and work. While highly theoretical constructions of Christian thought make important contributions to theological understanding, we finally measure the truth of such statements in relation to their practical significance. Our interest is to incorporate the promises and demands of the gospel into our daily lives.

Theological inquiry can clarify our thinking about what we are to say and do. It presses us to pay attention to the world around us.

Realities of intense human suffering, threats to the survival of life, and challenges to human dignity confront us afresh with fundamental theological issues: the nature and purposes of God, the relations of human beings to one another, the nature of human freedom and responsibility, and the care and proper use of all creation.

I read the book for less than an hour, and I feel like I could blog about United Methodist law and doctrine all day. But it's silly, right? Because ultimately the religious apparatus, which includes both Experience and Reason as important sources from which to derive theology, collapses under its own inquiry.

I've been thinking about religion and my childhood a lot lately, though. The new pastor at my parents' church is a mover and shaker whose theological ideas align about as well with mine as you can get while still being Christian; he offered today to put me in touch with another pastor who had a lot of influence on me when I was in junior high school. These are guys trained in carefully historicized analysis of scripture, who (I would guess) secretly deny anything like virgin birth and resurrection, but juggle with that complex view a sincere belief in the role of the Church and its social mission.

I am bewildered and conflicted. Because of this personal history, I am frequently frustrated when mainline Protestant Christianity is conflated with Evangelical Christianity, because the latter gives the former a bad name. (Evangelicals, eager to guard the linguistic turf of what it means to be "Christian," are as guilty of spreading this message as non-Christians ignorant of denominational subtleties). So I am often in the position where I am emotionally motivated to rise to its defense. But after wrestling with it for a long time I just can't accept anything foundational about it any more. It's a set of highly effective practices--the effects of which I am profoundly thankful for, years after I have ceased them--without a sturdy epistemic foundation.

Makes me so mad.

I feel the effect of this history on me even today. I feel the ways the words of the service affect me emotionally, how the rhetoric about the role of Christ etc. pulls me one way or another. I feel joy; I feel generous; I understand the meaning of Christmas and how to translate that meaning into action. I rationalize it by translating the theological language into something I can intellectually condone, but I know that those new words, not ingrained in me by years of ritual, would not be as powerful on me.

What is one to do?

Won't resolve this--one of the most significant puzzles of my life--tonight. For now: Merry Christmas, to you all. Thanks for reading.

A super power!

2009-12-23T23:34:06Z

My capacity to put things off until a time when I have no other responsibilities and then proceed to do absolute jack when that time comes may never cease to astound me.

Learning

2009-11-08T01:29:14Z

Unlike a lot of the people that I know and/or work with, I don't naturally try to discover the internals of every technical phenomena I encounter. I am lazy. This puts me at a disadvantage.

For example, I spent a lot of time messing around on and with the internet in the late 90's. I made a bunch of websites using a WYSIWIG HTML editor (what?), and I would get stuff to work that I didn't understand by following instructions. Sometimes, I would try to tweak things to make them work like I wanted, but frequently that would break them. More often than not, rather than digging in and getting to the heart of the problem, I would give up. (I'm not proud of this.)

One of the most mysterious parts of the internet at the time was CGI--Common Gateway Interface. At the time it was what all the HTML guides and web resources would talk about as the way to do persistence on the web. Want a counter on your website? It's a CGI script. A guestbook? A CGI script!

Unfortunately, I was pretty clueless about programming at the time, and even more clueless about how the web worked. So if I wanted a guestbook, I would use AOL's free guest book hosting solution, or whatever.

Even after some programming classes, server-side persistence of data on the internet has always been a bit of a mystery to me. Yes, I learned about Sockets in my intro to programming course, and made a dummy server with Java. But I had no idea how any of it worked. Java just abstracted over it and called it a "Socket." File IO, even, was a little spooky to me. And Java is kind of a pain in the ass anyway. No way I was going to write a guestbook in Java! But I didn't learn about server-side programming in any other language.

Even when I started working as a programmer for a web development shop, I felt left in the dark. They put me on full time as a JavaScript programmer. JavaScript, in case you didn't know, is the programming language which is downloaded and run in your browser. It is constrained to that environment, and sends things back to the server through a protocol that goes completely outside of the domain in which it runs. So, frustratingly, I got really good at a domain of programming which was completely dependent on another domain, which is what actually did all the work. My work was all about providing a sexy user interface to what was, to me, largely a black box.

If you know me and my dislike of dependency and disdain for style without substance, you could guess how painful this was for me.

But then things got better. I started to get the opportunity to learn Python in the context of Django, a web application framework. Not just poke at it, but to dig in. That was really empowering, because Python is a very expressive scripting language which is easy to play with. But the Django framework was still a black box, and abstracted over a lot of things. I don't think I would have any idea how to make a website with persistence that didn't depend on it.

In an IRC channel earlier this week, though, I was talking to greebsnarf about some old things on the internet, and I made a passing comment about CGI, which to me still meant some mysterious thing that The Old Internet ran off of. And greebsnarf said something like "It doesn't get simpler than CGI."

Now, I am not particularly responsive to adversity in the environment. But I am hella responsive to feeling stupid. So I realized that it was time for me to understand CGI. I looked it up. Apparently, you can write CGI scripts in any language! Apparently, they are dead simple! Apparently, I could write one in Python!

So I tried. And I failed in my first few attempts, because I'm actually pretty dumb about a lot of things. I had to put it aside and come back to it today to work on it. (I found the problem was that I hadn't put in the path to the Python interpreter correctly.) But I fixed it! That means that...

Today I wrote a working CGI script! I am very excited!

Emily Hope Price

2009-10-29T21:59:34Z

A colleague turned me on to this this morning.

Philosophy is important

2009-10-29T21:57:23Z

Sometimes people complain that philosophy is irrelevant.

Sometimes they mean that it isn't relevant with the day-to-day necessities and practicalities of life. You can't earn bread or clean your house with philosophy. Sometimes they mean that it is a distraction from a greater, political goal. You can't fight for justice with philosophy.

The first and most philosophical rejoinder to these accusations is that each one, properly speaking, presupposes philosophical attitudes. How can you know which day-to-day necessities and practicalities are important without investigating philosophically? How can you what what justice is without deriving it philosophically?

These are good arguments, but nobody listens to them. The reason why they don't listen to them is because it is based in an appeal to either generalized skepticism or the hierarchical organization of knowledge, both principles of inquiry whose epochs have long passed.

A better argument, I think, goes like this: there is one tool, above all others, that will be at your disposal in practical and political matters, and that is yourself. The obstacles of life are recalcitrant, the emperor is far away and well protected. Much of success in life is due to external chance. But every impact you have on the world will be mediated by your own self, and you have yourself at your disposal at all times to develop into something stronger, wiser, nobler.

At its best, the study of philosophy (or theology, or psychology, or anthropology, or any deep interrogation and challenging of ones assumptions and practices) is the conscious molding of oneself into something greater, so at the moment of greatest opportunity or adversity, you are ready.

paulhope @ 2009-10-25T02:31:00

2009-10-25T07:43:43Z

I talked to Melanie tonight. Towards the end of our conversation--which was, in my opinion, a rich one--the topic turned to the fact that we don't really know much about each others' lives now. It's been over two years since we were housemates. Our lifestyles are different, our outlooks are different, the way we relate to other people is different. We've grown.

Can we really say we know each other? Is there still a basis for friendship in the significant sense?

I feel so very strongly. I feel this way about a lot of my distant, low-bandwidth friendships. But it brings into focus a set of thoughts about relationships and knowledge-of-the-other that have been brewing for me lately.

Unfortunately, I don't think I can explain it in any less jargony way than this: When we think about or interact with others, we do so with some sort of mental model of them. The problem is that we have only so much mental storage and computing power, and so our mental models of other people are going to be much simpler than the complete workings of our own mentality. (With a few assumptions,) It follows that our mental models are in most cases going to fall vastly short of the actual complexity of the people we deal with, even if we interact with them every day.

There are a number of ways to deal with this problem.

The first is to bite the bullet and work with a simplified model of others. In some cases, this may in fact be the best you can do (Some people really aren't that complicated, maybe?) But most likely this way of relating to people is patronizing and degenerates to contempt.

The second is to supplement the mental model of the other with aspects of ones own mentality. One word for this might be "empathy." So the other stops being a machine that works like X, Y, and Z, but rather becomes somebody "who is like me except for differences X, Y, and Z." When people are similar, this works pretty well, since their projections are largely correct. And of course, shared experiences and "things in common" are solid foundations for friendships. But this method has its limitations. When applied to another person who differs from you greatly, projection leads to misconceptions. But if one never goes beyond this, then one is confined to a social world that is an echo chamber.

A third method, and one that I think I only ever articulated to myself fairly recently, is to be more accepting of anothers unknowns. You assume the incompleteness of the model. You acknowledge that the other is in part outside of your comprehension, prediction, and control. They are even more radically unpredictable than ones own self.

I've come round to the opinion that this third method is the only one that truly acknowledges others' freedom and dignity as an individual. But it is also, from a certain angle, is terrifying for its implications for friendship. How can one know that this unknown Other is being honest with you? Cares about you? Acknowledges your own freedom and meaningfulness and carries that meaning with them? On what do you ground, in a word, trust?

I don't have ready answers to those question; as is probably clear, they are ones I struggle with. But the zenith of my social life are those moments when a friend and I both acknowledge our unknowns relative to each other but nevertheless trust that we will make each others lives one of our own projects. The promise there not only of personal, individual growth through the other, but participation within a joint organism, irreducible to either of you, that operates effectively as one.

Whereas this kind of friendship has manifested itself in my life occasionally more or less by accident, this is what I consciously aspire to in my friendships these days. The plan for how to go about it is evolving, but I think it means being more proactively trusting and loving, despite mysteries, in the first place.

Men in One Hundred Years of Solitude

2009-10-18T17:48:10Z

Two things have prompted this post.

I read One Hundred Years of Solitude recently.
epictetus_rex attempting to discern the nature of Man (as in, the gender/identity/personality), and got me thinking about it.

One Hundred Years</i> was how compelling I found the archetypal male characters. ("Archetypal" because each of the characters manages to be both a character and an archetype.) It struck me, while reading, how comfortably I could relate to them, and especially how I could relate to them as standards of masculinity.

I couldn't put my finger on why until epictetus_rex got me to think about how my own sense of masculinity differs from others (in particular, his). In his framework, my answer would be the priority of "independence"--self-sufficiency, freedom of ones own will, power over oneself--over status or power over others.

This made something click. The men (and all the characters) in One Hundred Years of Solitude are all characterized by their solitude. This solitude is manifest in myriad ways--in the founding of a remote city, in the single-minded pursuit of the Philosopher's Stone, in guerilla military heroism that is motivated by pride but disdainful of honors, in lone craftmanship in throwing sweet parties, in love--but the theme carries. So many of those characters are heroic to me, even (I think this is telling:) when their traits that strike me as heroic are their greatest weaknesses and undoings.

It is strange to me that I am struck by this aspect of myself that I see with clarity has affected me my whole life. Perhaps I've just forgotten it. Perhaps it's because my solitude, like in Marquez' novel, is hereditary and so always seemed to be the norm.

Autumn

2009-10-06T23:19:06Z

I've now been living in a metropolis for two years, and some sort of city for six. It is the middle of autumn. My thoughts about this month's seasonal change until recently were, "There goes summer. It's just a long slide toward winter now. No more rooftop parties."

I had reduced seasons entirely to the state of the weather.

On Sunday I went back (to my parents') home in the suburbs. "Suburbs" may evoke the wrong image to some of you, because you are from plains or fields or something. Despite their being hotbeds of real estate development, my New England suburbs are still carved imperfectly out of forests. Old trees stand tall. Invasive creatures are the norm. It's not nature on any grand scale, but I can see why my parents moved out of the city to live there, why that was a triumphant step for them.

There are oak trees there, and where the oak trees are thickest the ground is covered in acorns. Chipmunks stuffing their faces brazenly ignore you. Some coniferous trees grow small red berries that look delicious but which I've always been told are poisonous to humans. Tall grasses sprout grain-like stalks of purple seeds.

What I had forgotten (and what was accented by Sunday's temperate weather) is that while autumn is when the weather declines, it is the time when the earth is most fruitful. It is ripe for us.

"No wonder things are so good," I think to myself.

Propositional logic in JSON

2009-10-03T14:30:13Z

Since laurent_atl asked...

My motivations for the propositional logic in JSON thing are embarrassingly speculative at this point. My official reason for looking into it is "the intellectual exercise."

But basically, I think it would be pretty cool if:

There were a way to represent propositional logic formulas in JSON
in a way that made it easy/natural to write the kinds of formulas that represent the way people tend to argue
and in a way that made it "easy" to do some common operations on those formulas (like, for example, conjoining them)

Preliminary investigation has revealed to me that JSON is (surprise!) not particularly suited to this task. But an example of something I've been toying with has been the following mapping:

[P,Q]	P or Q
P:Q	P -> Q
{P:Q, R:S}	(P -> Q) and (R -> S)

Most of my questions have to do with the best choice of meaning for the pairing operator (:)--implication, reverse implication, biconditional. In the example above, you could write a Horn Clause like (P and Q) -> R as:

[{P : false}, {Q : false}, R]

but I find that to be a pretty contorted way of representing that kind of implication to a human being. If it has to be that bad, might as well use XML instead. On the other hand, if ":" stands for reverse implication, then you get this representation of the above clause:

{R : {P : true, Q : true}}

which I think is quite elegant. Unfortunately, I don't think there's any way to represent negation in this system!

Any thoughts?

Day off

2009-10-03T02:10:23Z

I made an awesome decision earlier this week: to take today off.

I spent the morning in bed trying to figure out an appealing way to encode propositional logic formulas in JSON. (This is part of a master plan)
I ate a big brunch at my favorite diner where I updated my To Do list and realized that my job may be getting me to where I want to go after all.
Wrote a mediocre piece of microfiction.
I investigated graduate schools.
I wrote a blog post about the politics of open source that I've been meaning to write for a week.
I learned that Alex from the Big Hat is really going to start the blues band (that needs a harmonica guy full time, obviously), and that my old friend Kendell Woodstern may be in on it as the trumpet player.
Edited a friend's microfiction and investigated places to publish it. Fantasized about making a microfiction publishing cooperative website.
Did some laundry.
Made myself a big stack of quesadillas with black beans, cremini mushrooms, tomato, onion, garlic, and pepper jack.

Now I'm in a bit of a food coma from the quesadillas.

What I get, on days like these, is an encounter with the root of my being, where it is both productive and indolent. Operating alone, I am free to motivate myself, to hope and dream unrealistically, and to apply myself to ends I don't expect anyone else to appreciate in the near term.

Politics, how I relate to it now

2009-09-16T01:21:37Z

Almost exactly a year ago I wrote this post, largely about my politics, and I am a little disappointed that I don't see much change in my attitude since then. If anything I'm more apathetic, especially about electoral politics and governance.

This is partly because the main way I engage with governments now is as a sympathetic service provider. Most of our clients are government agencies working in some executive capacity. (Contrast with how I used to interact with the government, which was by campaigning for new legislation). We are two organizations with goals that happen to be aligned and good (get data out in an accessible way, support open source software, develop new technology that helps them do their (often technocratic) work well). Even when I work explicitly with "open government" in mind, it's not about putting popular pressure on legislators. It's about making a technical argument to the right human being about the best practices and tools for them, and trying to make sure the technology that's right for them also serves the greater good.

This suits me. I've never been a believer in any of the big Theories of Justice, or in any particular theory of Legitimacy. I don't believe that democratic governments Represent their constituencies or that legislators are particularly competent to govern. So I guess I hold them to a low standard. If there are serious societal problems, that's because society is seriously broken. Governments are just another kind of institution within society. But they are institutions that despite their flaws can do a lot of good, and most of the people in them--at least the ones we work with--are into using their positions of power to improve the way things work.

It's accomplishing a technological change. Is it accomplishing a political change? I think so. Because the main political challenge I care about these days isn't about representation in a government context, but about liberation/empowerment in a more general context. And knowledge, data, technology, etc. are, when easily and equitably available, liberating--they accelerate the disclosure of being by existence, they are the torch of truth that can be wielded best by the champions of humanity against its enemies. Sort of by definition, if I had a more specific idea of how these tools would be used, it wouldn't count as real empowerment.

Some parallels between 2008 and 2009

2009-09-14T02:31:41Z

Yesterday was the two year anniversary of my starting the Working In New York chapter of my life. Seems like a good time to reevaluate my life, goals, politics, etc. So I looked back to posts from last year to get a sense of how things have changed.

What I got was two parallel timelines of the summers of 2008 and 2009.

2008

July 17th -- Decide that I need to "start kicking ass"

July 22nd -- Frustrations with working too hard

August 19th -- Admission that earlier decision to work intensely isn't sustainable. Things getting better.

August 31st -- Depression and isolation!

September 10th -- Threw a big party, felt good about life, had an intense week. Decided to reevaluate life.

2009

July 16th -- Decide that existentialism dictates that I can't relax

August 7th -- The stress gets to me

September 7th -- Threw a big party, felt good about life after an intense week. Decided to reevaluate life.

Ok, so the comparison here is a bit misleading, because in fact I've left out important events that differentiate the two summers. The depressive dip seems to have been shorter. I actually threw and additional party on August 8th that helped regulate the stress (what? really? that's how I solve this problem?). The motivation for wearing myself out was less a negative reaction against my current situation and more and embrace of the potential of what I was working on.

But it's strange to face evidence that my life, which I've thought has been pretty ad hoc for the past two years, might be getting into some kind of cycle. Do I have some crazy seasonal affective disorder that makes me try to work too hard in July?

Meanwhile, I'm planning on traveling again in October. It's just how the timing works out, but this mirror's last year's Cape Town trip.

Eeriness aside, I think that whatever ups and downs there have been, life has improved in the past year on almost any metric I can think of. Well, awesome.

Ok, that wasn't what I meant to write this about at all.

This Week, I drank a lot of whiskey

2009-09-12T01:04:45Z

This week was one of those weeks when you don't have time to catch up with yourself.

Sunday night I through a very successful party that evolved into a 3:30 am outing to Brooklyn's J'Ouvert parade wrapping up with watching the sunrise on my roof with some Chinatown pork dumplings and a bottle of Ardbeg. Then I stepped through the seven people sleeping in the living room to take a nap, got up, and reopened the scotch because that day was Brooklyn's Carnival celebration and there was shit to do.

Sunday's party ended roughly 11pm on Monday night, by some measures.

Then the work week, which was multifaceted.

greebsnarf came over Wednesday and we had a great conversation about metaphysics, among other things. Unfortunately, things came to a close right before we got to the most important and hardest part: agency, causality, etc.

Thursday I learned that I am going to be sent to Belize for a few days at the end of September. Nobody yet knows much about what I will be doing there or why exactly I'm going to be there. Later that day, we had an office whiskey tasting. Laphroig, Four Roses Small Batch, and something distilled from rye in New York.

Today, I am staying home alone. I am trying to study for the GRE's. I take them tomorrow.

Ambiguity, Vagueness, Quantity, and Quality

2009-08-30T06:27:53Z

Hegel sharply distinguishes between qualitative opposition and quantitative opposition.

In qualitative opposition, the quality, a determinate being, is opposed by its other. For example, Hotness--the quality of being hot--is opposed by un-redness.

In quantitative opposition, the quantity is sublated determinatenes. For example, 100 degrees Celsius of heat is determinateness (a quality, heat) that has been sublated (its internal opposition with non-heat has been overcome and captured in the quantification of it). The quantity is opposed to another quantity, which is not its other. 99 degrees Celsius of heat is still heat. A quantity contains all other quantities as part of itself and is indifferent to the quality to which it is related.

This appears to leave Hegel particularly vulnerable to the problem of vagueness and the sorites paradox.

There are many cases where a difference in quantity seems to constitute a qualitative change. A difference in 100 degrees can be the difference between hot and not hot. A difference in wavelength or brightness of light can be the difference between blue and not blue. A difference in number of grains of sand can be the difference between a heap and not a heap.

One common contemporary solution is to deny the legitimacy of the language that picks out the qualitative distinction and demand a reduction to the quantitative level. "'Hot' is just a way of using language to pick out a set of conditions, its use is inconsistent and varies with context and speaker," one might say. "Really the question 'Is this hot or not hot?' becomes meaningless at the edge cases. There, we really should drop the unhelpful language and start talking about measurements."

Alternatively, for those who don't take the linguistic turn and instead take a cognitive one, the solution here is solved by fuzzy concepts. When computationally modeled, a concept is applied to a stimulus according to the presence or absence of certain features. This presence or absence might be a measurable, quantitative difference. The concept would then apply unreliably or only partially when those features are insufficiently but somewhat present.

On the (let's call it for the time being) phenomenological level, this sort of cognitivist explanation is no doubt insufficient, since it is a "third person" explanation. The mechanism by which stimuli activate a fuzzy concept is unconscious, so our knowledge of the mechanism most have as its ground a more basic logic such as the one Hegel is constructing.

The phenomenological correlate of the partial application of a fuzzy concept, however, is ambiguity. There are times when a being is neither purely a determinate being (quality, e.g., heat) nor the negation of that determinacy (the other, e.g., non-heat) but rather a being that is ambiguously determined one way and/or another. So far in Science of Logic, there is no accounting for this experience of ambiguity, despite its prevalence in human experience and, I would argue, its philosophical fecundity.

Paul Butterfield

2009-08-28T15:36:16Z

I've heard Steve Morrell tell me stories about him countless times, and I've listened and practiced along with his music for ten years. But for some reason this is the first time it's occurred to me to look up Paul Butterfield on YouTube and actually get a sense of what it was like to see him perform.

Good lord is he good.

Check out that technique starting at about 2:30 in the video. Again, I've heard it over and over again before, but the visuals there are breathtaking. Look at all that hand work. And his stage presence--all that movement.

Dang.

On Hegel

2009-08-16T02:55:58Z

So, you're sitting around reading Hegel, and you slog through a lot of prose like this:

In the pure reflection of the beginning as it is made in this logic with being as such, the transition is still concealed; because being is posited only as immediate, therefore nothing emerges in it only immediately. But all the subsequent determinations, like determinate being which immediately follows....*

And you do your best to follow along and understand what he's talking about.

"Wow, it's hard to know what he's talking about sometimes," you think to yourself, "but every once in a while I think I know what he's talking about and he seems on to something. He's probably a genius. I'm going to keep working at this and see where it goes."

So you keep on trucking, doing your best to keep track of how determinate being as such differs from determinateness and from a determinate being, and you ever begin to think you might be getting it, when suddenly he busts out a concrete example of what he's talking about like:

But even a stone, as a something, contains the distinction of its determination or in-itself and its determinate being, and to that extent is contains the identity of the stone with its other. If it is a base capable of being acted on by an acid, then it can be oxidized, and neutralized, and so on. In oxidation, neutralization, and so on, it overcomes its limitation of existing only as a base; it transcends it, and similarly the acid overcomes its limitation of being an acid. This ought, the obligation to transcend limitations, is present in both the acid and the caustic base in such a degree that it is only by force that they can be kept fixed as (waterless, that is, purely non-neutral) acid and caustic base.**

At which point you suddenly think, "You know what? Maybe Hegel is just COMPLETELY OUT OF HIS MIND. What the hell is this psychobabbly, alchemical bullshit? Why's he trying to bring pH balance into this?"

Two paragraphs later, he's talking about what it would feel like to be a magnet.

* Science of Logic, Miller translation, p.99 Chosen at random.

** p. 134. Bold emphasis mine.

Hip websterism. Music and identity.

2009-08-13T22:24:39Z

At work we've finally reached consensus that we shouldn't try to build a slick Web 2.0 web app without using a slick modern web framework. So suddenly all hell has broken loose and we've been allowed to futz around with Django in an officially sanctioned way. In a coup, we've taken the opportunity to try out distributed versioning control as well. So our futzing-with-Django project is in a Mercurial repository and is hosted on BitBucket.

The discovery is: all of this stuff is awesome. Django is totally slick and it's a joy to get shit done in it. Mercurial is sweet and is a joy to work with. All the hype is right.

My secret plan for a long time has been to actually apply some of the things I've learned how to do to actually accomplish something I care deeply about (so far my follow-through on this sort of thing has not been great). Django seems like an especially effective way to do that, so I'm glad to be tilting that way.

Hey, just now I realized that listening to cool music makes you think you are cool. It's a strange thing, because music is on the one hand external to you, and also often social. So the "feeling cool" part may just be smugness about ones own curatorial taste. I associated myself with music X; I think it's a nice choice. Maybe I think that other people will value that taste in me. So when I listen to it I am proud of being the sort of person who listens to X.

Some people take this to an extreme where they describe some of their music preferences as "guilty pleasures."* Why "guilty"? I guess to distance themselves from something they believe to be beneath them (socially? in some objective aesthetic sense?)? Very confusing.

But I think you could argue that it infects your experience in such a way that it ends up being internal as well. So, if I am listening to wimpily absurdist, resiliently detached music on my iPod in the subway, I will experience things around me in a wimpily absurdist, resiliently detached way.** Throw in some handwavy assumptions about neural plasticity, and all of a sudden you're a wimpily absurdist, etc. person! On the other hand, if I am blasting energetic, aggressive, and perhaps crude music from the highway***, then I will experience things in an energetic, aggressive, and perhaps crude way and... you get the idea.

So maybe music has more to do with identity formation than just endlessly reflected social anxieties!

Thoughts welcome.

* N.B. I don't do this.
** N.B. I don't do this either.
*** N.B. Or this.

paulhope @ 2009-08-10T20:12:00

2009-08-11T00:21:49Z

My back leaves sweat stains on this cheap futon. It gets darker but nobody has put the lights on. I still smell bacon fat.

I had been having trouble carrying the entire weight of the future. Without knowing it, planning Saturday's party forced me to confront such and enormous task with such immediacy that it flushed out all other considerations.

About midnight, when the band started playing, I knew that that my work was done. Since then, I have been as calm and open as an empty jug. I hung out all Sunday with Abraham and everabridged without the slightest feeling of anxiety.

Today I've felt the slow trickle filling the vessel again. It is not heavy yet; I can still be just in this moment if I choose to. Daydreaming is possible. I think I'm going to go for a walk outside.

paulhope @ 2009-08-07T00:34:00

2009-08-07T04:41:10Z

Lately, I've felt like I've only just barely been able to keep it together.

The thing that puts it over the edge might be all these roaches.

Hegel

2009-07-27T03:02:46Z

I've been on the mailing list of a philosophy meetup for a while and after going twice I am convinced that it's good value. The barrier to entry--actually reading some dense philosophy and being willing to talk about it and only it with some other people--keeps the quality of people and discussion quite high. And the fact that because it's just a meetup and so not full of academics keeps the attitude towards the material one of completely genuine interest and self-fulfillment. Looking forward to seeing where it goes.

I went to the inaugural Derrida meetup a while ago and keep failing to get to the next one. Today I went to the first one for Hegel's Science of Logic, which was intense, fun, and informative.

To be honest it hasn't been until sitting down to write this post that I've bothered to figure out what Science of Logic is really about. Now I have Wikipedia to help with that.

Hegel's work The Science of Logic outlined his vision of logic, which is an ontology that incorporates the traditional Aristotelian syllogism as a sub-component rather than a basis. For Hegel, the most important achievement of German Idealism, starting with Kant and culminating in his own philosophy, was the demonstration that reality is shaped through and through by mind and, when properly understood, is mind. Thus ultimately the structures of thought and reality, subject and object, are identical. And since for Hegel the underlying structure of all of reality is ultimately rational, logic is not merely about reasoning or argument but rather is also the rational, structural core of all of reality and every dimension of it. Thus Hegel's Science of Logic includes among other things analyses of being, nothingness, becoming, existence, reality, essence, reflection, concept, and method. As developed, it included the fullest description of his dialectic.

Great! I knew it was worthwhile! I'll see how far I get.

Hegel asks "With what must science begin?" What he really means is, "With what must philosophy begin?"

He makes the following argument:

Either it must start with something immediate or something mediated.

If it begins with something immediate, then in must start with a simple immediacy, which means with pure being, because if there were any determination or content to it then that determination would involve mediation, contradicting the supposition.

If it begins with something mediate, then that mediation implies a separate of something from another, which in turn implies that there is something, some work, that has gone before. That contradicts the very idea of a beginning.

So we must begin philosophy with pure being.

I take issue with two parts of this argument. For one, it presupposes that there is such a thing as pure, contentless being for us to start with. From our discussion, it sounds like one is supposed to encounter/become this pure being/pure knowing once one has finished reading The Phenomenology of Spirit. I haven't read it yet, so I don't know if that's true.

But even if it were, I don't see why it would be desirable to begin from it, because presumably those of us who have not yet read his Phenomenology aren't there yet. It seems presumptuous to propose a beginning which we aren't at yet, when in fact we have so much to work with where we are now. Yes, it is rife with determination, mediation, unreflective immediacy. But it also has love, resistance, and the potential of liberation. Aren't those what are relevant to us? Shouldn't philosophy be engaged with them?

I will suspend judgment at least until I see how the Science of Logic brings itself into contact with determinate content.

But I am warned/influenced by de Beauvoir here, who includes this statement prominently in her conclusion:

As soon as one considers a system abstractly and theoretically, one puts himself, in effect, on the plane of the infinite. That is why reading hte Hegelian system is so comforting. I remember having experienced a great feeling of calm on reading Hegel in the impersonal framework of the Biblioteque Nationale in August 1940. But once I got into the street again, into my life, out of the system, beneath a real sky, the system was no longer of any use to me: what it had offered me, under a show of the infinite, was the consolation of death; and I again wanted to live in the midst of living men.

More than ever before in my life I live in midst of living men now. More than ever in my life I am now one. I will need to approach Hegel on that plane.

Still on de Beauvoir kick

2009-07-12T17:05:44Z

The options once appeared to be:

Objective truth is what is revealed to us by a combination of rationality and empirical evidence, but only empirical evidence that we could detach from the particular observer. The Subject of knowledge is a single unified, disembodied subject of Reason of which we partake to the extent that we cogitate in lock step with it.
Objective truth is that which is present at the terminus of the unfolding of history or inquiry. The Subject of knowledge is that unitary communal subject into which we, as finite moments, are carried up into in a sublated form.

The problem is that we are finite. In particular, we have individual bodies without which the world is meaningless. So both proposed subjects of knowledge are chimerical. We--not as communal "we", but as you and I--are the subjects of knowledge.

Simple as this is, it is profound in that it entails that there are Other subjects. It makes Love possible, for example. It makes a substantive ethics possible.

But what of objective truth? It would be unacceptable to lose this concept in the fray.

There answer is that truth is being as disclosed through the infinitude of human projects linked together through time. We pass Being from One to Another, like a torch. With it, we set more aflame, bring more to light. But it changes hands.

What we must abandon is not the idea of objectivity but the idea of totality, in two senses.

First, as an existence (as a subject) I can never view the totality of Being. There is always a horizon for me. (To give the being within that horizon meaning I must extend it through the eyes of a genuine Other, who travels further down the road.)
Because Being is only that which will be disclosed by the free projects of the genuine, it is an open system. Horizons are a function of our point of view, not of the edge of the earth. Space-time is curved.

The Ethics of Ambiguity, continued

2009-07-09T02:20:23Z

Rare is the book that increases my admiration for both open source software and my Grandmother.