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Monthly Archives: August 2013

“What Can be Done in Syria” 2 pm, Conference Room 2e11, Free Coffee

29 Thursday Aug 2013

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in no-category

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Tags

civilians, counterfactual, protect the innocent

A follow-on meeting to http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/08/on-syria.html.

“Thank you for coming. And everyone thank Robert for requesting snacks as well as coffee and emptying out the Q2 entertainment budget. Remember, if we don’t use that line item, we lose it!”

“So… wow. Quite the turnout. Are all of you employees? It looks like ‘Bring-Your-Rich-Uncle-and-His-First-Wife-to-Work-Day’ out there.

AUDIENCE: laughter

“To begin with let me just say that Syria is the hypothetical Iraq that we didn’t invade. We left it in the hands of Saddam Hussein and in the last few years most of his generals have expired from sodomizing meth and smoking whores and the Baath Party is finally coming apart. Civil war is raging and the coke fiends are sniffing the sarin stockpile. Since we’ve avoided making the exact mistake in Syria that we made in Iraq we are in the happy situation of running this counter-factual experiment for real and figuring out how to topple The Brutal Dictator without actually sending in tens of thousands of troops and killing hundreds of thousands of civilians.”

“Perhaps we should back up a bit, though, and figure out what it would mean to roll back that goal. What if toppling the dictator wasn’t our precise goal? What if we were coming to it fresh, without all the justifications for the Iraq War still rattling around in our heads. What should our goal be for military action in Syria? … Put your hands up to be recognized, folks, that wasn’t a rhetorical question. Yes, of course, Captain America, front row.”

CAPTAIN AMERICA: “Protect the innocent!”

“Okay, Cap. Sounds good. I think we can all agree on that. Right? Anyone? Anyone rather I put down ‘fuck the innocent’?” Squeak of marker on whiteboard. “Protect… the… inno… sent. What else?”

MICHELE BACHMANN rises, blinking rapidly, “Keep Al Queda from winning!”

“From winning what sweetie? Yes, you in the back, clutching your beads.”

BEADS: “To keep the Muslin extremists from taking over Syria like they did Egypt and Tunisia!”

“Okay, let me jot this down here in red because I want to talk about it. This is the default position of everyone in the D.C. press corps, right?” Squeak, squeak, squeak, thump. “Period. Okay, so. Since a big part of the revolutionary force fighting Assad are Islamic radicals, this goal makes any intervention much more complicated. We would be defending civilians per Rule One and extending into Rule Two we would be defending and supporting fourteen different factions of secular revolutionaries. Further, this implies that we would be actively attacking Islamic revolutionaries as well as fighting Assad’s forces directly through surgical strategic and tactical strikes. So. Two, three, four fronts of military action in hundreds of random locations throughout Syria. Let me jot that down.” Squeak, squeak. “Four. Fronts. Times. One hundred.”

“Yes. And since from our perspective—looking down like gods from stealth bombers and drones and satellites in space—the battles will be fought on the ground between Assad’s forces and small groups in the rubble who have poor communications, mismatched gear, no proper badging, etc. And those small groups may be friend or foe, to be defended or contained or attacked. Right?”

“Okay, folks. How exactly is that supposed to work?”

ANONYMOUS: fart.

“So again, let’s go back and look at our goals.”

Cheap Theaters are Good

26 Monday Aug 2013

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in commentary, reviews

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Tags

health care, Into Darkness, Kelly's Hero's, Nerd Nostalgia, plutocracy, science fiction

I have two cheap theaters within walking distance so this weekend I caught up on my blockbusters and saw Star Trek: Into Darkness and Elysium.

Regarding Into Darkness, I don’t have too much to add to the comments I’ve already seen online except that Trek has become a Trek Nationalism (of a non-goosestepping kind) and that we are now being sold a repackaged, retold, re-convoluted version of a history we already know. We’ve had this before in movies about World War II (Kelly’s Heroes and Inglorious Basterds for two examples). Into Darkness is a ceremony of Trek Nation Nostalgia. While the film was excellent entertainment (in a scene-chewing-parody sort of way), I wonder if the folks who own the Trek Universe will actually start coming up with new stories the way The New Generation and Deep Space Nine did and Voyager didn’t. For the next film they’ll need a great new story, I think, or the franchise will fail for good.

Elysium is 85% of a great film. Production design was complete, the script was about done, blocking and continuity were worked out pretty well (apart from the shoulder-launched magic-missiles and the lack of gauntlets on the exoskeleton), but it still had a fair amount of story to tell or not tell, depending on the ultimate message of the film.

The message of Elysium, I think, was meant to be more generally an indictment of the self-righteous yet casual way our plutocratic overlords seek to make the entire world smaller and more manageable for themselves. Being a film instead of a series of episodes (which is the proper format for a deep narrative) Blomkamp focused on health care and tried to let setting take care of the rest of the message. This may have been a mistake. The negative comments about the arbitrary unfairness of the Elysium health care model (which ignore the arbitrary unfairness of the setting in general, and our own world) show that the message didn’t connect squarely.

Science fiction is about metaphorical messages about ourselves and creating fantasy settings that might be real. Blomkamp has done the latter very well in his two major pictures—better than any other current sci-fi film auteur, period.—but for the former he may need to move to a more long-form video medium. I wish him luck.

The Death of Advertising is the Creamy Center that Will Hold the Future Together

21 Wednesday Aug 2013

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in no-category

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Tags

die spammers die, optimism, the center does not hold

Every once in a while the author Stina Leicht will post the latest in a series of bloggos about the danger our society is in of being destroyed by the libertarian non-ethic. She focuses particularly on the lives of creatives.

I’ve restrained myself from commenting in support of these posts because I can’t face the depression. To respond properly I need to go to a very dark place, but a place I essentially live on the rim of.

Today it hit me after reading her latest The Center Does Not Hold that creatives can’t fight back because advertising has been the de-facto revenue stream for popular publications for almost two hundred years. This is especially true for journalists but it holds for everyone who rides the interface between the writing life, a living, and the day-to-day consumption of media by the general public.

Even here on my own blog: I was too cheap to upgrade to an advertising-free site so if you came here by a direct link you will see ads at the bottom. Sorry. I don’t get anything from the ads beyond the pleasure of resisting the shove to upgrade. WordPress doesn’t get anything either, to be honest, because no one reads this. Mostly it creates a spam queue full of automatically generated comments trying to lure me onto the SEO bandwagon. For the record, a worldwide purge of online griefers of the con-artist kind is a genocide I could get behind. Barbed-wire garrotes, gibbets, flaming truck tires, the whole bit. The hellscape I wish to rule over is decorated with the broken remains of human insectoids culled from strip mall back offices in the lands of  Flora and Russ.

Moving on, the rise of robust adblocking extensions, DVR, commercial-free cable TV and Netflix-style subscriptions are changing the world of advertising. Until twenty years ago ad-revenue was a cash cow for the media companies at the top of the heap. Deregulation allowed conglomerates to buy captive markets. This allowed them to cut costs by cutting coverage and quality without losing many consumers. Deregulation increased their leverage over advertisers too, raising their rates. It was the classic rentier ecosystem made more obnoxious by the conglomerates’ ability to keep the public from viewing exposés about their scam. Political support for maintaining the status quo was a trivial expense.

So in the early 90s Big Media had a license to print cash on newsprint and twiddle their bank balances using the broadcast spectrum. But since the rise of the Internet, no more! I for one welcome our adblocking and DVRing overlords underdogs. And the Youtube subscription channels? Bring it. At least that’s the theory.

Why am I more optimistic about the future for creatives? Because making production and distribution vastly cheaper levels the playing field between the subscription-for-quality-content model and the quick-n-dirty-content-as-a-vector-for-shoveling-shitty-ads. The greater demand for quality content (knock on wood) means that power will shift back toward creatives and their abilities.

There’s some distance to go yet and that distance will be paved with the coming rise of local ad-free subscription journalism in both dead tree and online forms. That’s a different topic for another post, though. Right now the paving doesn’t exist but I’m fiddling with blueprints and wandering around in the weeds with a machete, an armload of stakes and a spraycan of orange paint.

Man of Steel and the Possible Trap of Propaganda

10 Saturday Aug 2013

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in commentary, reviews

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Tags

canon

I listen to Pop Culture Happy Hour every week and their comic-book-guy, Glen Weldon, is a freak for Superman. He wrote a book about the history of Superman as a character and its influences in culture (I haven’t read it; it’s somewhere in my trans-dimensional queue. One of my infinite selves will get around to it one day.) and Glen Weldon hated, hated Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel. He hated it much so that I was prophylactically prepared for moral outrage when the movie came around to the three-dollar theater. One of the PCHH folks (probably Weldon) described it as “evil”. But I ended up being somewhat charmed by the movie despite its immorally unacknowledged body count and its monochromatic lack of soul.

I’ve had problems with Snyder’s previous work. I blamed him personally, as director, for the dead-eyed lack of performance in Watchman. What left Watchmen dead, however, informs Man of Steel’s portrayal of Superman’s actual origin story. This story is a seventy-plus-year-old commentary on the Romantic Übermensch-ian justifications for imperial nationalism that caused a half dozen world-ish wars during the 19th and 20th centuries. There’s really no way to be faithful to that and give it the modern sort of heart that a loving contemporary human might truly enjoy seeing. Apart from the time constraints, there’s simply no room in this canon retelling for any humanizing additions as there was in Smallville or the other Superman films. Snyder is working in the tradition of D. W. Griffith, not Richard Donner or Mario Puzo, complete with the implications of that kind of questionable historical ambition.

So the film has no humor and no statement of nuance that doesn’t rely entirely on the viewer. What’s left are the facts of the canon and the highest production values possible.

The one consistently annoying thing in this edifice (apart from the way the sound was turned up far too loud in the theater) was the incredibly tight framing of the shots. Visually, this is a movie of faces. Faces talking, faces reacting, and faces intercut with short shots of CGI mannequins driving each other through CGI concrete. Making this a film of faces makes it much more effective than it might have been otherwise and there is little chance of confusing or forgetting the important characters. But it’s a bit like some recordings of Philip Glass or the use of dynamic range compression. It’s the exhausting exploitation of a technique for maximal effect—and framing faces from the middle of the forehead down to just below their flappy jaws is nothing if not maximum—which becomes a statement in itself and it isn’t a statement of entertainment. It is information design. It is the knob of fidelity turned up to eleven. It might not be art.

If one assumes this movie is propaganda of heartless bashing, it is perfectly put together for the purpose, a well designed technical explication, an accurate restatement of an early formulation of a fictional canon and a simple philosophy. This reading might be a bit of a leap but it is possible because the film ignores what was lasting about Superman’s legacy, it ignores the stories that came later: Superman versus the Ku Klux Klan; Superman, Lana, and the version of Lois Lane that came about as feminism was going mainstream; Superman versus the corporate supervillain. This film is focused entirely on Superman as a presentation of the limits of theology, a depiction of a reluctant Übermensch. Not Christ as some badly-planned publicity seems to have attempted to present him, but Joshua or David plus a self-abnegating conscience.

The next film in the series will pit the government-friendly Superman against the insurgent plutocrat, Batman. If Snyder and Nolan have motives beyond canonical presentation of the original source material, they’ll probably show their hand much more obviously when they match the two heroes against each other. It doesn’t bode well that they’re skipping the sympathy-producing storylines of the 40s through the 70s in favor of Frank Miller’s edgy sociopathy.

Making choices about what is and isn’t canon will be revealing. If humor, human fascism and the quasi-legal plutocracy of Lex Luthor don’t make the cut, then the people choosing the cut will have shown their hand and we can look past the design of production and make clear judgments about the motives of the film’s creators.

I guess we’ll have to see.

Is Philosophy Dead? Weekend Entertainment for Saturday, August 3rd

03 Saturday Aug 2013

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in commentary, no-category, reviews

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cognitive science, in our time, philosophy, raymond tallis, the death of philosophy

Weekends are the worst days of the week for reading blogs and adding podcasts to the listening queue. Monday is nearly the best because the Sunday evening premium-TV sexplosion pushes the culture forward and gives it new fizz for one more week. Monday is Increment Day. If I were religious I suppose Sundays (or Fridays, or Saturdays) would be full of online entertainment because of the soapbox potential for religious writers. I wouldn’t know. But for the rest of us consumers of media, Saturdays and pre-evening Sundays are the dead time of our week. We have to drink and riot sometime, I suppose.

So I’ve decided to make everyone’s weekends worse with my own guaranteed Saturday posts. It isn’t really worse for you, the reader, because you don’t exist. This is 2013, and unknown blogs are a few AU past passé. I’m fairly certain that the only hits I get are robotic or accidental. That said, ritual practice is what the Sabbath is all about and as an atheist I’ve missed out on that benefit of incrementing my week with a regular bit of writing.

Yes, Philosophy is Dead

I listen to podcasts from the BBC. I have several months’ worth of In Our Time episodes piled up on my hard drive that I dole out to my phone. I consume In Our Time… religiously. Well, not religiously. I binge on it, which is a way to practice religion but not a healthy way. But while I can take or leave many of the BBC’s other shows—I’m finding Bertrand Russell’s Reith Lectures from 1948 numbingly slow going, despite their historical interest—I do tend to at least give a chance to episodes of less well-formed shows like In Science (an as yet terrible replacement for the excellent Material World) or The Infinite Monkey Cage.

The Infinite Monkey Cage is often annoying in the same ways as In Science. In the show from December of 2010, “Is Philosophy Dead?“, the monkeys (a celebrity physicist, two comedians, and a pop-philosopher) line up against Raymond Tallis, an implacably rigid foe of cognitive science. Throughout the episode Tallis is forced back repeatedly to the point that philosophy is not dead because science will never “understand” consciousness. Without any cognitive scientists to consult, of course, there isn’t much active refutation of Tallis’s points. This is interesting for a situation where Tallis is essentially making the same point as theologians did six hundred years ago when they pointed out that natural science (still termed natural philosophy at the time) would never understand the movement of the cosmos around the Earth. The Infinite Monkey Cage could have made use of at least one advocate for science that was both engaged and hostile.

What makes this episode an illustration of why Philosophy-Capital-P is indeed dying, or at least dissolving into an introductory text to other disciplines, is the lack of rigor its practitioners can have in using its own terms in public discourse—this lack of rigor may be instead an expression of their contempt for the public audience. When “doing” philosophy back and forth to each other, philosophers’ usage of terms are deemed important enough to write entire books about them, but in public discourse Tallis is throwing around the word “understanding” as if it didn’t require a 100,000 word dissertation to fully explicate the particular gyrations Tallis puts the word through.

During this show Tallis uses “understanding” to refer to the conscious integration of an idea and goes further to claim that science does not, and cannot, ever understand consciousness. This is fine for as far as that goes but seems to belie the fact that modern and post-modern scientific advances rely on mathematical formulations that cannot be consciously “understood” in any sense, much less the sense Tallis is using. Just look at the field of quantum mechanics. Very few (none?) “understand” quantum mechanics in the way Tallis seems to demand. So science isn’t necessarily attempting to “understand” anything in the way that Tallis uses the term.

“Understanding” in Tallis’ sense can only be the conscious integration an idea so that its contemplation and manipulation is relatively automatic. This is achieved when the study of a subject results in the capacity to come up with a workable solution to a problem without turning the problem into an mathematical exercise and rigorously doing all the sums. The form of understanding Tallis is using, from studies done by cognitive scientists, seems to rely on internalized heuristics and emotional measures of confidence. So a baseball outfielder understands the motion of a baseball’s trajectory through practice and is tested on the field every game. He doesn’t do differential equations. The fielder develops his heuristics by chasing the emotional validation he gets from a successful test. So being able to catch the ball is a measure of the fielder’s gestalt, studied, but essentially practiced understanding. I’m sure Tallis would argue that conscious understanding has nothing to do with heuristics but he doesn’t really offer the kind of Vulcan Mind Meld short version of what he’s talking about… which proves my point.

When it comes to mathematical ways of understanding we already understand a few of the pieces of consciousness and we will come to understand more. At some point we’ll begin building consciousnesses. We’re already beginning to build heuristics about what a consciousness would look like using existing brains as models. It appears that much of the difficulty is in understanding the physical structure of brains that already exist. So far, experiment is restrained by technological limitations, not mathematical definitions.

Understanding the Death of Philosophy

Understanding in the sense I ascribe to Tallis really is the original product of philosophy. Philosophers laid down general rules and heuristics to the elite (with specially dumbed-down versions for the masses) which they can use as assumptions whenever they are tempted to duplicate the heavy lifting done by the philosophers. In this heuristic sense, understanding is the wisdom received from people who’ve worked things out in detail and (hopefully) tested their work.

In 400 BCE, this was the revolutionary product of the philosophers as they began their thousand-year-long assault on religion. For roughly the last three to five hundred years (after the ascendancy of philosophy over religion) understanding has been produced increasingly by scientists, engineers, and other technical people. The contribution of philosophy to understanding that has happened most recently is classified as mathematics and computational theory. Tallis specifically claims these as continuing to be parts of philosophy. For him, philosophy remains the superset of knowledge.

But it’s funny. People working on the edges of mathematical logic and computational theory don’t seem to apply their findings directly to the things that people who call themselves philosophers do. They have opinions about things like the ultimate meaning of everything, free will, materialism, and questions about the nature of consciousness and cognition, but the only concrete contributions that new mathematical and computational theories tend to make is in mathematics and computational theory. Experimental science is informed by the math but strikes out ahead of it and often finds much room in apparent mathematical contradictions. The math is narrowed down by experiment, not the other way around.

For the bleeding edge, then,  mathematical theory can be used to form heuristics for exploration. Presenting the heuristic sense of a body of mathematics to practitioners and finding possible wiggle-room is an area of philosophical reasoning that is useful, but subordinate to both the mathematics and the science. Imposition of heuristic divinations by philosophers on the hard sciences still happens, but more and more rarely. The crucial place where philosophical divination currently likes to steamroll the investigations of working practitioners seems to be in the field of economics. There the heuristic rulemakers still attempt to rule from the editorial pages of the Edwardian era.

Philosophy’s Zombie Unlife, or, What Is the Further Function of Philosophy?

First, philosophy cannot, as Raymond Tallis hopes, put itself forward to offer absolute statements about the limits and future of a scientific field. In this case, using what I assume is a kind of blanket application of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem—he offers no specifics—Tallis simply states that science cannot understand consciousness.

So what can philosophy do? Philosophy can only function to provide a framework for heuristic understanding of knowledge for laymen, students, and practitioners of a field attempting to educate themselves about the bits they aren’t directly investigating. Philosophy mediates between the novice and the mathematically-stated state of the art. Philosophy does not make management decisions about what is or isn’t possible. Philosophy provides heuristics made-to-order for the world and not the other way around. The function of philosophy, in a word, is to educate.

So the further work of philosophy is to create new heuristics and revise existing heuristics to facilitate gestalt confidence in a scientific subject for laymen, students, and practitioners. This includes mathematics but crucially cannot lose itself in the desire to self-referentially climb the pole of mathematical understanding to reclaim primacy. Philosophy, as a system of heuristics for inducing confident understanding, cannot be supplanted by mathematics simply because so much of mathematics does not lend itself to generating heuristics.

The applicability of mathematical concepts themselves cannot be so easily determined for experimental fields without the actual experiments being performed. Philosophy mediates this, but philosophical predictions that apply conclusions of one field to another have stepped outside the realm of heuristic integration and education and into divination. As heuristics, these divinations can be useful but they are only heuristics. They serve to educate and impart gestalt understanding but they can also be graded as to usefulness. A heuristic that says “understanding consciousness is impossible based on my meta-logical understanding of mathematics applied to cognitive science where the mathematics and meta-logic isn’t yet well understood” is a terrible heuristic, but that is essentially what Raymond Tallis is attempting to do. Without a good heuristic framework for understanding its conclusion the heuristic itself is not useful in any way. It communicates nothing and educates no one.

A good general heuristic would be one of the many that is already being used in the field of cognitive science: consciousness already exists in the human brain. The physical structure, state, and health of the brain seems to have a great influence on the state of consciousness, so it seems that further investigation of the physical brain will yield more understanding of consciousness.

Final Words to Philosophers

You don’t have much time, so be useful.

Seriously, though, public philosophers must be educators and communicators. They are lovers of wisdom, and public lovers of wisdom should command at least some respect. It’s not like you’re in Marketing. Also, as articulate and respected public lovers of wisdom, philosophers should take the field of education away from the increasingly right-wing bureaucrats of the public and private educational systems and the “educational materials” industry. Or conversely, if you are a teacher tired of being talked down to by an increasingly necromantic and corporate administration, recast yourself as a philosopher and develop heuristics to share with your students and your fellows.

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