October 25, 2009
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A writing revolution
Nearly everyone reads. Soon, nearly everyone will publish. Before 1455, books were handwritten, and it took a scribe a year to produce a Bible. Today, it takes only a minute to send a tweet or update a blog. Rates of authorship are increasing by historic orders of magnitude. Nearly universal authorship, like universal literacy before it, stands to reshape society by hastening the flow of information and making individuals more influential.
To quantify our changing reading and writing habits, we plotted the number of published authors per year, since 1400, for books and more recent social media (blogs, Facebook, and Twitter). This is the first published graph of the history of authorship. We found that the number of published authors per year increased nearly tenfold every century for six centuries. By 2000, there were 1 million book authors per year. One million authors is a lot, but they are only a tiny fraction, 0.01 percent, of the nearly 7 billion people on Earth. Since 1400, book authorship has grown nearly tenfold in each century. Currently, authorship, including books and new media, is growing nearly tenfold each year. That’s 100 times faster. Authors, once a select minority, will soon be a majority.
(Graph & excerpt from "A Writing Revolution" by Denis G. Pelli & Charles Bigelow in SEED Magazine)
We, the creators of the free information society, mean to wrest from the bourgeoisie, by degrees, the shared patrimony of humankind. We intend the resumption of the cultural inheritance stolen from us under the guise of "intellectual property," as well as the medium of electromagnetic transportation. We are committed to the struggle for free speech, free knowledge, and free technology. The measures by which we advance that struggle will of course be different in different countries, but the following will be pretty generally applicable:
By these and other means, we commit ourselves to the revolution that liberates the human mind. In overthrowing the system of private property in ideas, we bring into existence a truly just society, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.
- Abolition of all forms of private property in ideas.
- Withdrawal of all exclusive licenses, privileges, and rights to use of electromagnetic spectrum. Nullification of all conveyances of permanent title to electromagnetic frequencies.
- Development of electromagnetic spectrum infrastructure that implements every person's equal right to communicate.
- Common social development of computer programs and all other forms of software, including genetic information, as public goods.
- Full respect for freedom of speech, including all forms of technical speech.
- Protection for the integrity of creative works.
- Free and equal access to all publicly-produced information and all educational material used in all branches of the public education system
(from "The dotCommunist Manifesto" by Eben Moglen)
October 24, 2009
Information, memory, & time travel: a tangential thought experiment
The scheme seems ingeniously simple and technically feasible. To overcome oblivion, say the authors, all you need are sensitive miniature sensors and several terabytes of storage, which are already or soon-to-be affordable. You can then record every minute of your life using video, audio, location and physiological signals, culminating in the commitment of this endless stream of information to your personal MyLifeBits account in your pocket and/or in cyberspace. Proper software will permit you to retrieve the information years later, and it will even pass by default to your progeny for eternity, with the hope that they will pay attention to it.
New Scientist: "Memory & Forgetting In The Digital Age" by Yadin Dudai
Dudai brings up some valuable criticisms of the claims being made by the authors, representing a certain faction of technologically minded futurists.
More worrisome than the idea itself is the prevailing assumption that such a recall would in fact be total. Even in its most outlandishly comprehensive form, such technology would merely opportune an augmented reiteration of a numerically unique prior occurrence. Assuming the commonly held empirical view of time, experiencing such a recollection would, no matter its immersiveness, retain distinction, even if only by merit of such numeric identity.
Let's suppose such a device has been built and that it is able to record and induce a recollection so immersive as to be indistinguishable from the original experience. By means of Brain-Computer Interface (BCI, yet another emerging innovation) the device thoroughly records the user's external context as well as affected perceptions and corresponding mental states. In fact the user of this device becomes so immersed in the recollection that he or she would have no idea that it was in fact a recollection, their brain state having been reverted to the time of the initial occurance. They may have forgotten the intervening memories, or else are unable to recollect them. Either way, they essentially live the experience as if for the first time. Of course, when the user is brought back to the present, they become aware of having gone back into their archived past. This shift may be disorienting, or perhaps as banal as turning off a television. Either way, they now have knowledge of having lived the experience, archived it, and subsequently recalled it. All the while, they are recording information. This means they may now recollect recollecting.
What happens when they step back into the moment of stepping back into another moment? Deffering any conclusions bearing resemblence to popular science fiction, this shows that even the most immersive recollection will retain its numerical uniqueness, if only in retrospect.
June 28, 2009
On Pure Capacity
In his discussion of the ideas presented by Democritus in The History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell casts the problem of void in a different light, suggesting that the problematic notion be reconsidered in terms of pure capacity rather than spatial terms. Democritus was a philosopher from ancient Greece, a contemporary of Socrates (though still considered to be among the pre-Socratic thinkers), who advocated a theory of physical reality that is a remarkably advanced precursor to today's atomic theory. In brief, he theorized that all matter is made up of imperceptible tiny particles called atoms. The most significant way this theory differs from our present day conception of atoms is that to the Atomists these were necessarily impenetrable, indestructible, and indivisible. There was no further divisions that could be made; atoms were thought to be the absolute smallest building blocks of which every physical thing we encounter is comprised. The Atomists held that the atoms existed in a pure and limitless void, through which they could move freely. At first, this seems natural, basically suggesting that there is a space in which the atoms exist. But if these atoms are the absolute smallest particle which makes up everything that exists, then this space cannot be made of anything that exists and is thus void. Needless to say, this is problematic, or at least it is if we consider void to be the absence of matter.
But if we look at it in terms of pure capacity, then the paradoxical statememnt of positively referring to a negative concept (e.g. "there is nothing here") is, if not eliminated, at least made more comprehensible. In other words, it makes sense to say that we cannot truly conceive of or positively refer to a negative concept such as void. But we can, and I think we do this in our everyday language, positively indicate a level of capacity or degree of something in particular, while we cannot make an utterance that references to, or even conceive of, "nothing."
But what about our concept of nothingness? How is it that we can meaningfully convey anything by this word at all? Certainly we intend to express this all of the time, and wouldn't it follow that we must have somewhere in our heads a concept of it that we understand ourselves if we have an intention to express something? How could someone wish to express something they have no concept of? Certainly if we meant to say "no capacity for x in regards to y" we would say just that, rather than convoluding our ideas with such misleading words as "nothing."
In support of Russell, the Atomists, and common speech, I cannot think of any instance outside of discussions in theology or metaphysics where "nothing" would hold such broad meaning as it does here. In general, if I say "there is nothing in the box," I am really saying that the box does not contain anything mentionable, that is anything besides air or possibly packing material. The person to whom I am communicating the absence of contents in the box would undoubtedly think me peculiar if I informed him that this box contains air. Utterances such as this are also highly dependent on context. A word like nothing, though a noun, is unique in so far as it cannot be conceived to exist independently of its context, as can most other nouns.
There is no question that we do, if in a limited capacity, understand negative concepts on their own. How this can be the case has been the concern of many philosophers throughout history, including Plato's famous argument of recollection in Meno and Immanuel Kant's theory of Transcendental Idealism, which he presents in his Critique of Pure Reason. As I said above, I think that it is the case that we always ascertain a negative idea like nothing by thinking of it in terms of its context, as an absence of the thing or idea to which it refers. But how do we arrive at understanding isolated negative concepts such as nothingness or void? The fact that we refer to them in a positive sense indicates that there is a transference. Rightly or not, it seems to me that we can arrive at a notion of pure nothingness in and of itself by means of induction: there is no ketchup in this bottle, I am short fifteen cents, etc., until we have an idea culminating in a general law-like understanding of absence-in-general, which we, for the most part correctly, apply to describe situations, both observed and hypothetical, that seem to fit its criteria. But to this law-like understanding of absence-in-general, we can only talk about positively, in so far as to do otherwise would be something like removing words from a sentence instead of adding them, or not thinking of an idea to think about it. So, language provides a meaningful and convenient shorthand for such complex inductive thoughts that we barely understand but can successfully convey nonetheless. I suggest that it is by pure analogy that we can successfully entertain and convey these sorts of thoughts, just as it is by pure analogy that the word "negative" refers to its meaning.
It also seems to be so with language in general: that words can somehow be related to the thoughts of their author in such a way that they more or less can reconstruct the author's mental state(s) in a second person is a profound notion. While the Atomists' views regarding the natural world, though insightful and correct to a certain extent, has been exceeded by modern physics, the theory could be applied with more success to our language, and then to the minds of speakers and hearers. Such a theory might culminate a unique take on some problems in philosophy mind, exploring the power of metaphor and symbols of language as mechanisms of pure capacity. Further, such a model might aspire to bridge the waring so-called clashing disciplines of "analytic" and "continental" philosophy.
But if we look at it in terms of pure capacity, then the paradoxical statememnt of positively referring to a negative concept (e.g. "there is nothing here") is, if not eliminated, at least made more comprehensible. In other words, it makes sense to say that we cannot truly conceive of or positively refer to a negative concept such as void. But we can, and I think we do this in our everyday language, positively indicate a level of capacity or degree of something in particular, while we cannot make an utterance that references to, or even conceive of, "nothing."
But what about our concept of nothingness? How is it that we can meaningfully convey anything by this word at all? Certainly we intend to express this all of the time, and wouldn't it follow that we must have somewhere in our heads a concept of it that we understand ourselves if we have an intention to express something? How could someone wish to express something they have no concept of? Certainly if we meant to say "no capacity for x in regards to y" we would say just that, rather than convoluding our ideas with such misleading words as "nothing."
In support of Russell, the Atomists, and common speech, I cannot think of any instance outside of discussions in theology or metaphysics where "nothing" would hold such broad meaning as it does here. In general, if I say "there is nothing in the box," I am really saying that the box does not contain anything mentionable, that is anything besides air or possibly packing material. The person to whom I am communicating the absence of contents in the box would undoubtedly think me peculiar if I informed him that this box contains air. Utterances such as this are also highly dependent on context. A word like nothing, though a noun, is unique in so far as it cannot be conceived to exist independently of its context, as can most other nouns.
There is no question that we do, if in a limited capacity, understand negative concepts on their own. How this can be the case has been the concern of many philosophers throughout history, including Plato's famous argument of recollection in Meno and Immanuel Kant's theory of Transcendental Idealism, which he presents in his Critique of Pure Reason. As I said above, I think that it is the case that we always ascertain a negative idea like nothing by thinking of it in terms of its context, as an absence of the thing or idea to which it refers. But how do we arrive at understanding isolated negative concepts such as nothingness or void? The fact that we refer to them in a positive sense indicates that there is a transference. Rightly or not, it seems to me that we can arrive at a notion of pure nothingness in and of itself by means of induction: there is no ketchup in this bottle, I am short fifteen cents, etc., until we have an idea culminating in a general law-like understanding of absence-in-general, which we, for the most part correctly, apply to describe situations, both observed and hypothetical, that seem to fit its criteria. But to this law-like understanding of absence-in-general, we can only talk about positively, in so far as to do otherwise would be something like removing words from a sentence instead of adding them, or not thinking of an idea to think about it. So, language provides a meaningful and convenient shorthand for such complex inductive thoughts that we barely understand but can successfully convey nonetheless. I suggest that it is by pure analogy that we can successfully entertain and convey these sorts of thoughts, just as it is by pure analogy that the word "negative" refers to its meaning.
It also seems to be so with language in general: that words can somehow be related to the thoughts of their author in such a way that they more or less can reconstruct the author's mental state(s) in a second person is a profound notion. While the Atomists' views regarding the natural world, though insightful and correct to a certain extent, has been exceeded by modern physics, the theory could be applied with more success to our language, and then to the minds of speakers and hearers. Such a theory might culminate a unique take on some problems in philosophy mind, exploring the power of metaphor and symbols of language as mechanisms of pure capacity. Further, such a model might aspire to bridge the waring so-called clashing disciplines of "analytic" and "continental" philosophy.
May 17, 2009
Thoughts Regarding CP Snow's "Two Cultures Divided"
“Two Cultures Divided” was a lecture given in 1959 by C.P. Snow, arguing that culture is fluent in the humanities while illiterate in science. I don't believe this has ever truly been the case. The vast majority of the people I've encountered (including those in art school) seem to be only capable of thinking in purely analytic terms. In my view, this is a root problem in our cultural psyche that must be resolved. I am by no means devaluing analytical thought (any coherent thought must contain a degree of analysis), but it's privileged reign as the sole method for understanding presents a worldview that is myopic, provincial, and destructive. Viewing the world in such a manner emphasizes the universally embraced means-ends dogma, which in itself is poisoning our society. We must eliminate it by learning to disregard all ends and practical measures. We must be sincere in our actions, aware of the intrinsic value in each of our daily activities. There must be autonomy in our day-to-day activities; by this I mean that we must recognize the value of this moment, rather than deferring its value to an unrealized hypothetical moment. We must widen our definition of knowledge and truth to contain poetic truths. Poetic knowledge and scientific knowledge are not at odds with each other. To distinguish them is a profound category mistake, one that has proven to be detrimental to humanity. I believe only when these are embraced not merely as equally valid, but also as IDENTICAL, will we overcome the practical maladies this conceptual misnomer has caused (hatred, global warming, etc.) If you are thinking to yourself, “how idealistic,” then it is only evidence of the problem’s ubiquity. To assign categories is to make judgments regarding the thing(s) that the categories are assigned to, and this is a direct consequent of the tyrannical grip the analytical has on our psyche. By this practice of placing an object (be it person, thing, argument, etc) into a category, we are confining our understanding of that object. I’m not suggesting that we ought to abandon names or language altogether, but that the perverse habit of confinement ought to be regarded as such. Rather, we ought to refine our analysis to description. Once our understanding of poetry and science have been merged into a single unified understanding, then we will be able to expand our concepts of things beyond the restrictive limits that centuries of dogmatic analysis has proclaimed to be the limits of sensible, coherent understanding and see coherence and meaning beyond the contradictions that have until this point marked off the bounds of what we are permitted to cognize. In other words, to say there is a divide between “humanities” and “science” is an illicit and superficial distinction; since they are at heart the same thing, (a process of induction rather than reduction), then they ought to be able to communicate as such.
March 23, 2009
Fragments On Chinese Landscape Painting
Poetry excells by its transparent luminosity. It is like echo in the air, color in form, the moon reflected in water or an image in a mirror; words have limits, but the meaning is inexhaustible.
On the pink-beige paper of a four-meter long handscroll unbounded ink washes alternately darken and pale to invisibility, in a style known as "apparition painting" - in Chinese, wangliang hua, in Japanese, moryo-ga. From foreground to hirizon the painting reveals an extraordinarily comprehensive landscape, mostly mountainous, simultaneously divided and knit together by water in all forms, from rivers and lakes to mists and clouds. A few sharply defined details - a bridge, a path, a viewing pavilion, a boat - guide the viewer's gaze along the bird's-eye view over mountains and streams.
The artistic expression by or addressed to Song scholars represents for the first time man's inner states; the mind-at-work becomes the object of philosophical investigation and of artistic representation.
And see these pictures, his thoughts would be a vast expanse of water.
Tranquil, you can perform all kinds of movements
Empty, you can internalize the myriad realms.
Experiencing the world, you walk among men;
Contemplating the self, you lie on cloudy mountains.
Heaven's wind suddenly sends the sound of the pagoda's bell,
Wakes me from pure reverie roaming Xiao Xiang!
Complex pictorial space draws the viewer's attention from the immediate to the intinite, and the ink-wash technique, which suggests forms rather than delineating them, invests the real landscape with the attributes of a dreamland.
March 15, 2009
The Poetic Structure of a Twelfth-Century Chinese Pictorial Dream Journey - Valerie Malenfer Oritz
One of my all time favorite pieces of art writing...
by Valerie Malenfer Oritz, originally appearing in Art Bulletin, volume 76, issue 2, (June 1994), p. 257-278
The Poetic Structure of a Twelfth-Century Chinese Pictorial Dream Journey - Valerie Malenfer Oritz
by Valerie Malenfer Oritz, originally appearing in Art Bulletin, volume 76, issue 2, (June 1994), p. 257-278
The Poetic Structure of a Twelfth-Century Chinese Pictorial Dream Journey - Valerie Malenfer Oritz
March 11, 2009
February 9, 2009
Descended into mist
“I wonder,” she began.
I looked at her.
“I don’t know...”
Our necks were craned, the glimmering speck descending into the mist.
Her words descended into mist
My ears craned to listen.
My ears craned into mist.
Something glimmered.
I looked at her.
“I don’t know...”
Our necks were craned, the glimmering speck descending into the mist.
Her words descended into mist
My ears craned to listen.
My ears craned into mist.
Something glimmered.
January 29, 2009
January 7, 2009
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