Welcome to students; Arendt on technology, thought and thoughtlessness

A young Hannah Arendt. She looks like she could make philosophy fun; about 20 years later, though, she would coin the phrase "the banality of evil." Image found here.

Last week was the first week of classes for me; in all the busyness of that time, I didn't have time to post a Welcome to students here on the off chance that they might possibly visit here. Consider this, then, a belated but no-less-heartfelt welcome. I am very much looking forward to the new semester, and I hope you are as well.

As has been my custom for a while now on first days, last week I asked students to introduce themselves by telling the class why they're in school, something "interesting" about themselves, and to ask me a question. Someone asked me what was the wildest, craziest thing I ever did in college; before I could answer, some wiseacre said, "He probably left a period off a sentence." Hardee-har-har. What I told them was that, good old Texas Lutheran College being only about 3 hours away from Laredo, there were occasional very spontaneous road trips down to the border for, as Gary P. Nunn once gracefully described it in song, "cultural exchange." (The days of a barely-closed border are now long gone, alas.)

Anyway. Someone else asked me what I do for fun. Well, sometimes I try to learn some things on my own for fun, which is where Arendt comes in. Long ago, I once mentioned a couple of passages from the prologue to her book The Human Condition; for a Comp II assignment I wanted to look up something from the prologue and, one thing leading to another last night, I've up and decided to try to read the rest of her book. Am I a fun guy, or what?

Arendt's book is an attempt to answer a deceptively-simple question in a world where labor (broadly defined), once culturally-esteemed, seems in the past half-century or so to be something to escape: "What are we doing?" Note how you can read that question as both genuine inquiry and in a rhetorically-despairing way. What follows is another excerpt from the Prologue that I'd forgotten, one that points in the direction of the rhetorically-despairing. Arendt's book's immediate occasion is the launching of Sputnik, but the following passage seems especially prescient, given that she wrote her book a year before the invention of the integrated circuit. For Arendt's "thought," by the way, substitute "contemplation":

[I]t could be that we, who are earth-bound creatures and have begun to act as though we were dwellers of the universe, will forever be unable to understand, that is, to think and speak about the things which nevertheless we are able to do. In this case, it would be as though our brain, which constitutes the physical, material condition of our thoughts, were unable to follow what we do, so that from now on we would indeed need artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking. If it should turn out to be true that knowledge (in the modern sense of know-how) and thought have parted company for good, then we would indeed become the helpless slaves, not so much of our machines as of our know-how, thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is. (3)

Worth pondering, students, as you use SpellCheck while editing your work. (Hint, hint.)

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Caption Contest

Watch, consider, then post your submission in the comments section. The winner will receive a Blog Meridian Virtual Snow-Dome!



(via Andrew Sullivan)

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Of Dogs, Intelligence, and the Internet

[This needs a bit of smoothing and fleshing out in places . . .]


Yesterday, my college's Philosophy Club made a short road trip to Newman University to meet up with students and faculty in their fledgling Philosophy program (they're just getting a major off the ground there--something of a surprise to me, given the deep historical connections between Catholic thinkers and Western philosophy).

The topic was artificial intelligence and its myriad implications for human beings. IBM's Watson was our starting point: we noted that Watson is a big storehouse of information and some algorithms for sorting that information, but it shows no capacity for learning from its own mistakes or the mistakes of the Jeopardy! contestants it played against. Chris Fox, of Newman's faculty, mentioned that the capacities for reflection and self-awareness have to figure into questions of intelligence. "Computers don't laugh at themselves," he said. His example was dogs: They seem to have a kind of intelligence in that they seem immediately to recognize other dogs as dogs, no matter their size or appearance, but (so far as we know) they don't reflect on their (or their own) dog-ness.

Along these lines, Jeff Jarvis of Buzz Machine (via Andrew Sullivan this morning) has a recent post called "In a dog's net." Apropos of a "CBC Ideas series about how (we think) dogs think," Jarvis takes the idea that dogs "think in maps informed with their smell" and that they thus "have a different sense of 'now'” and muses,

It strikes me that the net — particularly the mobile net — is building a dog’s map of the world. Through Foursquare, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Maps, Layar, Goggles, and on and on, we can look at a place and see who and what was here before, what happened here, what people think of this place. Every place will tell a story it could not before, without a nose to find the data about it and a data base to store it and a mind to process it.

On the same show, canine Boswell Jon Katz argues that dogs respond to changes in their map: “hmmm, those sheep aren’t usually there and don’t usually do that and so I’d better check it out to (a) fix it or (b) update my map.” Dogs deal in anomalies. So do data-based views of the world: we know what happened in the past and so we know what to expect in the future until we don’t. Exceptions and changes prove rules.

As long-time readers of this blog know, I frequently try to talk about how the Internet, and technology more broadly, mediate between us and knowledge of the world, simplifying and distorting our experience of it if we use it uncritically. Jarvis' comments, it seems to me, bear this out. The phrase "a mind to process it" is the small but crucial one here: maps are, or should be, something like a modelling of the mind that produces it--and, indeed, directs our thinking along the lines of that modelled mind. I've not yet seen the program that serves as Jarvis' jumping-off point, but the impression I get from his remarks is that dogs make no judgment about the scents they collect and sort--a scent is a scent is a scent. There's the association of a specific scent with the specific location where the dog encounters it, but (apparently) no linkage made between, say, the locations where s/he also locates it. There's no sense of spatial relations between/among these places. (GPS devices, it occurs to me, are more sophisticated than this only in that dogs, because they have better noses, don't require satellites and disembodied voices to guide us through space.)

Humans long ago created a technology that models the world as the (human) mind apprehends it: maps. Maps show their reader at a glance where things are located in space; moreover, by choosing what to show and not show, their makers have made judgments about what is significant for their reader to know and not know. We are free to argue the values of those judgments, of course, but the implicit message of maps is clear: some things are more worth knowing than others. Indeed, once upon a time, maps quite literally oriented their readers in accordance not with a physical direction, but a worldview. Surely that is a more-or-less basic description of the human mind, too: we experience, we forget, we remember, we interpret and re-interpret, we decide what matters.

The internet-as-map doesn't do any of those things. By implicitly presenting all data as equivalent in value, it can lead to reductive, uncritical thinking in its users. It shapes our thinking in accordance to its modelling of the world and not the other way around, and most of us are at best dimly aware that this is so.

Put another way: some of my students think their smartphones are, in fact, smart.

A dog's way of mapping the world is perfectly fine--if you're a dog! If the 'Nets map the human world in the way that dogs map their world, I'm not too sure that that's entirely a good thing for people.

UPDATE: Somewhat apropos of the above is this post about a couple of programmers teaching a computer how to recognize double-entendres (specifically, otherwise innocent sentences and phrases that one can follow, "heh heh"-like, with "That's what she said"). Unless I'm missing something, this seems to raise the question raised by John Searle's Chinese Room thought-experiment: does the computer really understand that it's making these jokes? Is it "in" on them as it makes them?

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Only two sports out here: Philosophy, and Spring Philosophy

(via Matthew Yglesias, who found it here. Click on image to enlarge.)

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Brazil as (jungle-)green screen

Over at my academic blog, Domestic Issue, I've just posted a little something on the intellectual history of Brazil--the topic all America is buzzing about, I know--by way of a discussion of a book on that very topic. (It's no longer in print, or else I would link to it.) [EDIT: Just to be clear here, I'm speaking of how this book has treated its subject up to the year 1870, which is the point where I am right now.] The upshot of the post is that the book reads very strangely, to my mind: its author argues in the introduction that we need to be attentive to the historical fact of large numbers of indigenous and African people and that fact's influence on Brazilian thought, but then has spent the hundred or so pages I've read a) also arguing that a multicultural approach to Brazil will not reveal an unalloyed Brazilian mindset; and b) pretty much all but ignoring all non-white Brazilians. It's an indirect verification of something that Darlene Sadlier argues in her book Brazil Imagined, which I recently wrote about with regard to literary regionalism here: that cultural products whose subject is Brazil, whether by Brazilians or non-Brazilians, historically have been more like projections of their makers' fantasies or nightmares, rather than products that purport to show Brazil as it in fact is. I have a little speculation over there about the Brazilian intelligentsia's wholesale embrace of Positivism, also.

You're hearing about all this because, I reminded myself this morning, Brazil's history with regard to the integration of indigenous and African people is very different from Mexico's, and that when speaking of "Latin America," it can be easy to forget or elide those differences. Even the earliest discussions of intellectual history in Mexico contend in some way with its indigenous past and its significance for the nation at that point in time, even if to rail against it. Up to the point that I've so far read in this intellectual history of Brazil, there's plenty of railing at the Jesuits' alleged detrimental effects on intellectual life there; otherwise, Indians and blacks are all but invisible. The gaze is turned toward Europe. Projected on all that green of the Brazilian interior, all they see is what they've borrowed from Europe. But no Brazilian forest, and no trees.

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Being and Nothingness and a Cloud of Dust

Pre-Game Coin Toss Makes Jacksonville Jaguars Realize Randomness Of Life

(via Andrew Sullivan, and in memory of my bloggy friend Winston Rand, whose beloved Titans get mentioned.)

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"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds"

Why, thank you, Mr. Emerson, for providing me with a handy excuse for not acknowledging your birthday yesterday. How, well, conformist to recognize a person's birthday on that day. "Whoso among you would be a man must be a non-conformist," I hear you say, and I say Aye. Here, I say in my manliest fashion, is my virtual tribute to you.

Of course, this same man also famously said, "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know." Well. I am sorry to report that there are times, as I think back on many things that I have come to believe are true, when it really does seem to me that "what I know" is Emerson--or maybe, better put, Emerson in tension with the ideas of his student and gentle gadfly, Thoreau. And Thoreau is, to my mind, not fully knowable without some knowledge of Emerson. Good old Blog Meridian is filled with quotes from, allusions to, and unconscious restatings of these men's words, ideas and attitudes about the world; remove all that, and it would become effectively disoriented. It would lose what might in fact be its prime meridian (or maybe its equator--but you get the idea: some big, important, navigation-type thingy).

So: I'm just going to shut up and let the opening paragraphs of Emerson's 1836 essay "Nature" speak for a bit (my source for the text is this site, which has all the Emerson texts most people will ever need):

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.

Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design. Let us interrogate the great apparition, that shines so peacefully around us. Let us inquire, to what end is nature?

Some brief--I promise--yammering below the fold.

When I've taught Emerson in the past, I tell my students that this essay's opening paragraph, coming as it does 60 years after our nation's declaration of political independence, is our declaration of philosophical independence ("Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?"). That second paragraph, meanwhile, could not be a better argument in favor of the compatibility of science and religion (some neo-medievalists among us, you know, would argue otherwise) and in so doing, I just noticed this morning, all but states out loud Derrida's famous phrase "always already"in the antepenultimate sentence of this excerpt--except, instead of "philosophy," Emerson says, we'll find Nature: the source of philosophy.

There is nothing outside the (Emersonian) text. No wonder I keep returning to him: there's no escaping him.

Happy birthday, sir.

UPDATE (May 27): Belatedly (as is usual with me), it was after reading Aunty's comment that it occurred to me that some of you might prefer to read your Emerson in paper form. Though this doesn't have the essay I quoted from above, it does have all the essays of the First and Second Series (including important essays such as "Self-Reliance" and "Experience"), along with a brief but very helpful introduction.

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The Poetics of Space and Easter

In trying to establish, finally, my long-since-announced pattern of Friday Music, Saturday Film, and Sunday Book entries, I've decided to right the ship with this entry.  I hope it won't turn too weird.
I am slowly working my way through Gaston Bachelard's 1958 book, The Poetics of Space.  The slowness is due in part to my workload and in part to the fact that, though Bachelard is by no means the most difficult reading there is, his ideas are of the sort that require a slow mental digestion.  Consider the task he has set for himself: how we experience space--specifically, the spaces in houses and other structures, such as birds' nests and animals' shells.  Note: NOT the objects themselves, but the spaces formed by them.  This is often the subject of poetry and narrative, he argues; thus "Poetics" as opposed to, say, "Phenomenology," which he says his work is.  So, then, a fusion of phenomenology and poetics, as we see in these passages from the Introduction:
Only phenomenology--that is to say, consideration of the onset of the image in an individual consciousness--can help us to restore the subjectivity of images and to measure their fullness, their strength and their transsubjectivity. [Yet t]hese subjectivities and transsubjectivities cannot be determined once and for all, for the poetic image is essentially variational, and not, as in the case of the concept, constitutive. . . . For a reader of poems, therefore, an appeal to a doctrine that bears the frequently misunderstood name of phenomenology risks falling on deaf ears.  And yet . . . the reader of poems is asked to consider an image not as an object and even less as the substitute for an object, but to sieze its specific reality. . . . In this domain of the creation of the poetic image by the poet, phenomenology, if one dare to say so, is a microscopic phenomenology.  As a result, this phenomenology will probably be strictly elementary. . . . To specify exactly what a phenomenology of the image can be, to specify that the image comes before thought, we should have to say that poetry, rather than being a phenomenology of the mind, is a phenomenology of the soul.  We should then have to collect documentation on the subject of the dreaming consciousness.  (xix-xx)
And off we follow Bachelard as he takes us into cellars, attics, corners, trunks, making us SEE these very familiar spaces as though we'd never really seen them before--and, of course, we haven't: they are spaces, after all.  They can only be experienced.
Which brings me to the Tomb, whose void we celebrate at Easter.  A former pastor of mine, in one of his Easter sermons, said that Easter is God's "Boo!", His big surprise.  But what shocks us is not Jesus' body, but its absence.  It is the space of the empty tomb that shocks, what is NOT there, that sets the mind to contemplating, Bachelard-like, this image that transcends language.  Jesus was delivered from death into life--and at no time other than Easter do we see and hear more clearly (and ironically) the pun in the phrase "from womb to tomb."  Jesus' tomb becomes the womb out of which not only He but all who believe in Him are born without a fear of death's power.
Back to Bachelard now: what is most impressive about his writing is his patient reading and obvious love of the poetry and narratives he's chosen.  He knows just how hard to push something; he doesn't overreach.  His tone is so modest, yet that modesty often leads his reader peering over the edge into a chasm of realization and catching his/her breath as s/he grasps the full significance of Bachelard's thought.  Or perhaps I'm overstating things a bit due to the time when I first started reading this book: I had just recently started reading House of Leaves, and it was quickly evident to me that Danielewski was more than a little indebted to Bachelard's work in terms of some of the themes he plays with in his novel.  For those interested in the intersection(s) between HoL and The Poetics of Space, have a look at this thread from the HoL forum:
this thread from the HoL forum. You might also find this other thread of interest as well, about the architect Peter Eisenmann.
Bachelard seems irrepressibly cheery as he discusses domestic spaces; if you read the first thread above, you'll see that I address that cheeriness and that, indeed, one way to understand how the horror works in HoL is as a sort of "what if" reading of Bachelard.  No matter, though.  Reading Bachelard is a magical experience.

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