Non Servium

Games as Art Redux

2011-07-15T10:14:00.010-07:00

Awhile back I was on a "video games as art" kick. This video made me reevaluate my premise a bit:

Previously I found it entirely possible for video games to be art, since the only hurdle I perceived, and that a majority of other thinkers perceived, was interactivity. The thinking was that that hurdle was largely arbitray. Video games are like photography, once our experience bias dies off there will be no bar to them being recognized as an artistic medium.This argument isn't invalidated, but it must be revised.The largest hurdle for video games being a valid artistic medium is capitalism.No, I'm not claiming that the other, established and recognized forms of art aren't capitalistic, just that video games, for the most part, are MORE capitalistic, to the point of being almost completely run by capitalistic influences.

Art is generally at least partially developed independently of the audience. Some audience consideration may, obviously, apply but for the most part the artist is, first, catering to their own view of what "should be".The artists skill, or luck, at gleaming popular interests and desires influences the success and recognition of the work, but this is rarely the primary goal.Marketability is definitely a factor (generally post hoc), but isn't the primary concern of the creation itself. The work exists prior to marketing factors.

Most video games are made by committee, with only a vision of potential marketability. They exist to maximize profit, first. Because of this they are consciously sculpted to appeal to the largest audience possible, they are shaped with a conscious eye to human psychology, and demographics. From the beginning they are purely capitalist inventions. Any form of expression is purely secondary, and often just a further means to monetize the work by consciouly appealing to the the largest targeted crowd. Marketing precedes the work.

Yes, this reasoning is present in all of the other, recognized, arts. But generally works created as a marketable commodity first, and all artistic worth being tertiary if a consideration at all, are considered "low art". Highly manufactured "pop music" is a good example of this, as are "commodity novels" such as much of the annoying "young adult supernatural romance" field, and other "assembly line" books, this is also true for "popular art".None of these fields would be considered as "artful" as more the more rarified (and less marketable) works of established artists.

Most so-called "triple A" video games are more comparable to a cheap romance novel than to the works of Tolstoy. We consider the former to be valid aesthetic expression, while the former is merely trash. The romance novel may amuse us for a short time, but Tolstoy provides grist for thought and introspection. Tolstoy teaches as something about ourselves, the works point beyond themselves. Generally the corporate approach to creation prevents this, they merely represent themselves for the ends of creating more money for a giant corporation (not necessarily even the creator). They have no creator, as such, and thus no "soul" (Yes, I too hate that term, but its the only one that comes to mind).

Art is a conversation between the artist the audience. It exists in the interplay between intention and interpretation.As such there is an element of serendipity contained in the definition. With corporate "arts", such as "video games" this element is completely lacking, since the whole medium is about controlling the interpretive aspect. Most video games are about "consumption" and not contemplation.

Obviously these new observations aren't meant to be universal, but they are still generally widly applicable to the larger part of the industry. I also apologize for the roughness of my content and language, it has been a fair amount of time since I've attempted to sound intelligent, so I'm out of practice.

Discuss.

(As a quick, off-topic, note: why does the internal blogging client on Blogger insert 7,000 superfluous "span" elements? Let's call this "span spam". I would post an example, for some reason Blogger won't render ">" or "<" properly, either. Furthermore, for some reason I can't even change the font of the total post. Which renders this service a bit more than useless.)

A quick note on aesthetics and history

2009-06-19T15:32:00.001-07:00

There is yet another lamentful post on Slashdot about how video games lack artistic merit. Anyone who knows me on even in the most cursory of ways will know that this is an issue that deeply engages me. Not so much aesthetics of video games in general, but the relation of art to modern society.

The general theme among most of the people I talk to who actually care about such things (the minorest of minorities) have a general conclusion that the arts are dying, or at least dramatically reduced from some prior pinnacle of their former glory. The idea is that the various arts flourished "back in the day", and now languish in obscurity, where only a few poor kind souls attempt to keep the flame alive.

This brought me to a bit of accidental nuance to my view, it isn't so much how art relates to modern society, but how art relates to modern CONSUMERIST culture, where being a commodity is a goal unto itself, and salability is an ends-unto-itself beyond mastery or skill (the Latin ars root of art comes in here). How can something that we usually see as a means-to-itself (aesthetics) live in a world where the only thing that matters is consumer mindshare, and mass production?

With this new-found specifity (which MSWord has decided is not actually a real word) of my purpose flowing into my mind, also came its negation.

Art in the contemporary context is probably exactly what art has always been.

Yes, read that again, as I'm going against the popular conception, and my previous misconceptions.

Nothing has changed.

Now that I got the pithy single-sentence-paragraphs out of the way, let's explore this; there has always been two forms of public art, the art for the masses and the art for artists. By always, I mean since the first modern human sketched something in the sand with his or her hairy finger, up until now where we have massive film and game studios spending millions of dollars to release the next brown-and-beige ultra realistic WWII/Tactical Stealth blockbuster or romantic comedy.

The idea that art is languishing in current times is supported by the fact that there is so much "consumer grade" mass-produced pap floating around, and very little actual "deep" content to be found. Here are some quick observations to prove this point:

Hollywood is in the grips of acute sequelitus, and churning out purely derivative works (such as comic book movies). What little that is "unique" is formulaic and shallow. All romantic comedies are the same, all pure comedy movies are the same, all action movies are the same. They follow a predictable formula, have the same actors, and are extremely vapid and shallow. No intellectual engagement is involved, and upon experiencing them you remain unchanged. They are passive, shallow and trite.
Most of the bestselling books are also formulaic crap. Books seem to have a better chance of actually being good and innovative for some reason, but a quick glance at the various lists of books the people actually read will show that most books are mass produced crap. Poignant stories of families, stories of love, etc... Other books are purely iterations of older themes, such as the Harry Potter phenomena, which is nothing but a rehash of older themes, and completely shallow. It might be enjoyable (I say this only to avoid the flamewar), but is still requires no emotional or intellectual investment, something that we find essential to "real" art.

There is a lack of style in most video games. Mostly they go for a boring gray-brown "realistic" palette, and try for realism as much as possible, and most games, game-play wise, are boring cut-and-paste jobs from previous successful games in their genre, with perhaps a single added gimmick to sell themselves as better than I-XVI in whatever series. Boring stealth based first person shooters, and WWII simulators abound. When we actually move towards game with story (RPGs), we find the same trite "the princess is in another castle" clichés, where our young man grows up to be a man, and saves the world (same crap that infests 99% of fiction).

As for traditional visual arts (painting, etc) we are simply rehashing stylistic elements made popular in the 20's and 30's, with perhaps some Andy Warhol color hacks thrown in for good measure. The popular market is infested with Tuscan doorways and sad American Indians, with a good smattering of Bob-Rossian nature scenes, and boring Thomas Kincaid crap. It has grown largely into an exploration of "style" and not of "content". The clever has supplanted technique and mastery. Art is becoming a visual pun, and a statement of our individuality.

I could go on. The point of the above was to highlight how seductive this line of reasoning is, and also how common it is. Of all of you reading this, I'm sure the small percentage of you who actually care have muttered things like this before.

We must remember that there still are great things happening in each area of the arts, there are unique things, innovative things, and truly awe-inspiring things. But we perceive the ratio to be vastly different from what is used to be. Hence the idea that "art" is dying, or literature is dying (the recent spring book edition of the Nation claims this times beyond counting). Each academic field of the humanities spend more time lamenting their own death and irrelevancy, than actually creating or analyzing (their job) their field. Philosophy is very good at this, just about every major work in philosophy since Wittgenstein (or Heidegger) has claimed the death of philosophy at some point, while blithely continuing philosophizing after that. Philosophy is far from unique in this, though.

This perception is a lie.

Cultural memory is a strange beast. In the short term it focuses on the negative, holding the current up against some glorious (and mythical) past. In the long term, when we decide to call it history, it focuses on the unique, innovation, and grand achievements. Modern memory is largely negative, while long-term memory is largely positive. This creates the fallacious idea of "the good old days", and how everything is decaying more rapidly. This is a self-perpetuating lie. This is my revelation, or at least an important sub-clause to it.

90% of everything is derivative, shallow, and made for mass consumption (though it is usually based on some past moment of aesthetic glory). The 10% that is truly masterful, though, is what gets filtered through the lens of history to come to us. The lens of history, we can say, has a very limited bandwidth, so we only get the important bits, the rest of the pap gets filtered into some general "spirit" of the age.
I have two related premises that support this conclusion, as it relates to the various fields of aesthetics. There always have existed two distinct flavors of the arts, and the second a more general point about the content of culture as it moves through time.

There have always been two major motivations in the creation of aesthetic artifacts; means-towards-an-end, and the ends-unto-itself approaches. Artists can hop between these two classes, but a majority of work is created in the guise of the former, though the latter is where actual meaning is created, and innovation happens (mostly). In the means-towards-and-end mode, the ends can be financial, prestige, or furthering ones self-identity and social place. In the other mode aesthetics is the main point of the work, even if the creators want to sell or distribute their work the aesthetic integrity is the most important goal, with all the other ends being enslaved to that one goal. We can think of this as "mastery". The means-towards-an-end mode focuses on mass acceptance via incorporation of popular styles, easily digestible bits of the current popular culture, and marketing techniques/psychological tricks. We can simplify this as saying that the first, and more popular, mode values form, while the masterful mode focuses on substance.

Artists can fall into either mode, but most of the time they are in the formulaic one.

For every thousand WWII shooters, there is one Katamari or No More Heroes. For every thousand Stephen Spielbergs, or trite fart joke comedy, there is a David Lynch or Stanley Kubrick. For umpteen billion Dan Browns, Rowlings, or Anne Rices, there is a House of Leaves, or such. Etc... The lens of history will slowly erase all of the background noise, and purify it into just the shining examples of innovative culture. The other things are inconsequential, and thus not worth remembering, they all blend together into a gray, irrelevant mass. In short, the formulaic popular aspects of any culture just aren't worth remembering, given the limited bandwidth of history.

The second, and much broader, premise I would like to attach here is that of signal to noise ratio, as this directly relates to what we're discussing here, but is much more deep and general. For every pathway of communications there is a lot of meaningless chatter, and a small amount of genuine meaning. It is our job to filter out the noise, and focus mostly on the small meaningful amount of content.

The common myth is; as the amount of available forms and pathways of information transfer has increased, the amount of noise has become too prevalent, and thus lessens the value of communications as a whole. To bring this back to aesthetics, there are now being produced more types of arts, and in greater quantities, than there ever were in the history of culture, and this lessens the value of the endeavor. Because there is more production, there is more crap, out of necessity.

Being that our short term cultural memories focus mainly on the negative, things appear to be much worse than they were when there was less. And being that the paths of communication increase, as do their bandwidths, things must be continually worse than they were at any previous point. The fact that every generation has viewed themselves as in decline goes towards this point.

In short: the signal to noise ratio remains constant even as amount of communications rises, the end result is MORE signal, but harder discrimination. (I'm now using "signal" and "content" interchangeably)
The point we miss is that this ratio of signal to noise remains constant. So even if there is more crap, there still is more actual content worthy of our attention. The average value of human communications remains the same, even while increasing dramatically. But being that there is more noise, the difficulty arises in the discrimination of the content from the background. How do we find the actual substance in a sea of mere form?

In the long term, history will continue to play this role. As to how to achieve this end in the short term, I leave that up to the reader, I have no clue. This is one of the most important problems that we face today (as evident in most of our recent important developments being that of synthesis, as opposed to creation of new ideas).

Pessimism and fatalism are the human condition, but we should always avoid taking these as the truth. If we are constantly in decline, then how have we reached the pinnacle we currently stand upon? We indeed stand upon a pinnacle, but sadly the view is obscured by fog.

You are Special, no REALLY

2008-12-17T12:54:00.003-07:00

Reading the latest installment of Psyblog (which sometimes has semi-interesting missives) has reawakened, and given another point of evidence, towards my deep (and deepening) distrust of the human side of psychology. For those who cannot click on links, its talking about a test that highlights the participants "character" strengths. Most (if not all) psychological tests are about outlining flaws, deviations, and weakness, or assessing risks. The authors of this new test have decided that this focuses too much on the negatives, and we should strive to stroke off people as much as possible. Behind the test is the idea of an anti-DSM, the accepted guide to all that can go wrong with a persons mind, leading their lives into despair and disorder.

My first reaction to this, outside of a sardonic chuckle, was the pure uselessness of the endeavor. If you need to take a 240 question test to tell you what is RIGHT with you, you obviously have something wrong with you. Perhaps the willingness to take this test should be added to one of the various depression inventories out there (such as the Beck Depression Inventory). It's like going to the garage, and having your mechanic do a diagnostic to see what is actually working on your car. The desire to do this can be traced to desperation, to the motive of "what ISN'T wrong", implying that it seems that everything IS wrong.

The second reaction was one of sheer futility. The DSM and psychological testing exist to highlight problems in one's cognition that can hurt the ability to function in daily life. Actual mental disorders don't exist outside of this scope, without a functional impairment (can't hold a job, can't make feinds, can't live self-sufficiently) there is no mental illness. There is no point to testing for "functionality" in psychology, since it is the norm, and thus taken as a given. A test telling you; "Man, your bloody creative, aren't you?" is useless, it doesn't serve to seperate the metaphorical wheat from the chaff.

The only purpose of this project is to stroke egos.

Which brings me to the tangent I've been setting up here; why must we stroke egos? Our full society seems to be based on making people feel some deep sense of baseless pride. We start by trying to raise our children with some mythical sense of "self-esteem", we teach them to be proud of their VERY being, as if it was some profound accomplishment. Then we try to teach all of our society the same pride of difference, that we should be happy that we are individuals, as if there was anyone who existed who wasn't (should identical twins be less proud, being genetically identical?). Then we should all be proud of our cultural diversity, and thus our cultural backgrounds (but not too proud of that). Then we spend our adult life with our higher ups (under some HR sponsored program) trying to reward us for doing our obviously thankless and largly skill-less tasks, and even for mere attendance to our duties.

All this has done has raised a generation of closet solipsists with egos only matched in size by their sense of self-entitlement. This generation long line of thinking has made the terms "pride" and "respect" wholly meaningless, and utterly masturbatory.

Respect used to be an earned commodity, both for external and internal referents. Now all we do is expect others to respect us as much as we respect ourselves (for no reason). Currently we view respect as something that others must give you, and not something that you must give to others. YOU, and only you, are to be respected, there is no feeling of reciprocity.

This is true for courtesy as well, since one can only find a thing worthy of consideration is one can respect that thing. I'm led to believe that we are confusing respect, pride, and mere empathy here.

NO one is special, you are just another sweating body within our giant society, pulsating with thousands of anonymous faces just like yours. You are no different than the 5.9 billion other people in the world. You are functionally NO ONE. Respect comes from the act of differentiating yourself from the crowd. Achievement is separating yourself from the crowd, differentiating yourself. Achievement is the function of action and not mere being. You must DO something to be respected, it isn't a passive value.

I respect Da Vinci because of his paintings, and not merely because he is Leonardo Da Vinci. If I remove the lasting fruits of his talents, he ceases to exist in the historical sense. Obviously much respect cannot be accorded to one who is forgotten.

This is true for yourself and others. You have no reason to respect yourself, until there is an action worthy of pride. I am proud of myself for hammering out this pile of crap your reading. I, on the other hand, am not proud of existing. I had no choice in the latter, there was no skill involved, no choice, where the former was an active choice, and required some modicum of skill. Even then, I'm not proud of MYSELF for writing this, I am proud of what I wrote. The external result of action is a valid target of pride, not the creator. I can respect my ability to write, perhaps, but this is not a reflection of the whole.

Even more inane is respecting the culture/race you were born into, or share heritage with. My being is, at least, somewhat shaped by myself, whereas me being of x decent is wholly incidental. What basis can there be of being proud of being x, when we have no influence over it, no choice in picking it, no individual responsibility whatsoever.

At most I can identify with the culture/racial group. This is a far cry from being proud though. I might even "like" my self-identification with that group (since these things are largely a choice). But this still is not a reason to be proud.

Even more odd is the strange modern move towards being covertly proud of mental illnesses. How many misguided idiots are proud of their mythical aspergers or adult ADD (or any other nebulous and almost universally applicable illness, like mild depression)? I say mythical for reasons outlined above, a mental illness isn't an illness if it doesn't impair your ability to function in the society in which you are embedded. Without matching this criteria, it is a mere quirk, something we all have, and thus doesn't fulfill the need to differentiate ourselves from the faceless crowd.

This is the crux, WE ALL WANT TO BE SPECIAL. This striving (and destruction) of respect and pride are not external goals, but internal ones. We want to differentiate ourselves from others. With this in mind, handing out self-respect and pride like candy is harmful to the worth of society as a whole. When we are all well dosed with baseless self respect, we have no reason to actually do anything useful to earn it. It allows us to be passive. Why paint that painting, or lead that social revolution, when your perfect as who you are.

The conspiracy theorist in me would like to paint this as an issue of social control. Perhaps Foucault would have something to say about this, passivity is always useful to the status quo, whereas dynamism might be harmful, thus supporting the latter over the former is always beneficial by definition.

Misplaced pride and respect are harmful. And instilling it as a perverse virtue should stop. If you can't find a reason to feel good about yourself, you should DO something to earn it. If your wholly dissatisfied with yourself, DO something to change it. Action is panacea when it comes to mental issues.

Here is the direct link to the test (registration required): http://www.viasurvey.org/

And for the record, my strengths are: a love of learning, curiosity, and creativity. See, now you know so much about me that I can be truly unique in your eyes. Which brings me to a more technical problem with this test (and many of the ones that are popular now online), the questions are vague, so vague as to be almost universally applicable. This is an especially evident onus in "positive" tests of self-identity as we generally have a far more positive outlook of ourselves than allowed by reality. We like to be good people, we like to identify with positive attributes, even if they are wholly lacking in us in reality.

Technorati Tags: philosophy, self-esteem, psychology, tests

America's Constitution: A Review and Musings

2008-07-23T12:33:00.002-07:00

I just finished reading Yale Law's Akhil Reed Amar's America's Constitution: A Biography last night, it was a very interesting, but dry read. Basically it is a front-to-back interpretation of the US Constitution, taking into account the historical context of each section, and major point, and what social factor came to play in their drafting. His self stated themes are that the founders were more democratic than we give them credit for, but also that they were more "slavocratic" as well.

Slavery plays a massive roll in the story, with its tendrils reaching from the founding, to the more modern enfranchisement amendments of the late 20th century. The effects of slavery, and later the Civil War are really the over-bearing themes of the book. The yoke, it seems, was written into the document, and took almost 100 years, with the enactment of the twenty fourth amendment, to be purged.

I suppose we all realize this on a subconscious level, those Southerners often don't let us forget how... backwards... they are. From the founding, where the pro-slavery bits had to be inserted to guarantee the South entering our "more perfect union", to the Civil War, from Jim Crow laws, to largely opposing all voter enfranchisement acts besides the most recent (fixing the voting age at 18), the South has been the bulwark of racial and sexual oppression. Just think of their race (and gender) relations from 1776 to 1962. Sometimes I think Lincoln should have just let them go, and saved the rest of us some trouble.

Before some Southerner reads this, and tries to tear me a new one, I'm focusing on the States, and not individuals. When I state that my home state is Republican (I'm sick of the red/blue fallacy), I do not state that everyone in my state is such, nor that I am, just that the majority are, and thus in spirit the whole state is.

As a point, the author avoids being Whiggish as much as possible, while still voicing his disdain at inequality. Sometimes his historical neutrality is somewhat questionable in the aforementioned slavery issues, but that is understandable.

An interesting, though completely unstated, contained in the book is the parallel between women's suffrage, and black rights. The rights (or lack thereof) of black people were debated since the drafting of the constitution, and continually a conscious issue for the American government, while women's rights were barely even thought of until the late 19^th century. The Constitution itself has things to say about blacks (mostly disparaging, and pro-slavery, like the 3/5^ths rule), but is completely silent on the issue of women's rights. To me this proves that the very idea itself was unthinkable, a woman voting, or holding office wasn't even an imaginable course at the drafting. It wasn't repression as much as a lack of imagination. It wasn't even an idea, much less an actual rejection.

The rights of blacks was imaginable at the time, so their denial can be seen as deplorable without risking being Whiggish, where women's legal rights wasn't even a “thinkable” proposition, and therefore we can't judge it since there was no freedom to choose the “right” course of action. Only when we become aware, do moral actions become possible, and only then can we start judging.

This brings me to my major revelation, much of the post-founding history of the Constitution was based on inclusion. Most of the post Bill of Rights amendments enfranchised various neglected sects of people, until all were included. It is almost a Hegelian process. You can almost tangibly sense the expanding sphere of liberalism in the process.

The second revelation is that voter participation has been slowly expanding to allow those of us who were enfranchised to slowly participate in more and more in our federal government, and generally become more powerful as individuals. Tangentially, I would say that the influence of this trend is rather mixed, leading to greater control and representation, and a greater dose of “the tyranny of the masses”. The only real bar remaining on this front is the Electoral College, which comes across as a hack, or quick fix, quite frankly. It seems to exist mostly for technological reasons, and not for any valid political reason, especially so now when much of the technical reasons are moot. The author even hints (in a very subtle manner) at this institution as fodder for future amendments.

Another interesting trend is the move away from states rights. This develops hand in hand with the various civil rights amendments. This is another mixed move. On one hand the move fixed (and was prompted by) the repressive trends that they seem predisposed to, on the other hand it removed the ability of states to line their laws up with the needs, wants, and character of their populace. While this move killed Jim Crow, it also bars states such as California from experimenting with medical marijuana (for example).*

The author's discussion on the Second Amendment is also insightful, in that he invalidates both prevalent modern positions on it. Neither the libertarian “everyone may have guns, with no restrictions”, nor the liberal “there are no militias, and thus gun ownership must be regulated” are correct, or textually informed. The death of state militias after the Civil War made the second amendment empty. Militia, in the historical context, meant an organized, standing, military within the control of the states, and not, as we now think, an unorganized body of citizery. He states this by looking at the phraseology of the amendment, it is the right of “the people”, and not “persons”, meaning it is a collective right, and not an individual one. Also the very term “bear arms” has a clear historical military meaning, and not a recreational one. Hunters and hobbyists don't bear arms, military units do. What practical impact this has, though, is left largely to the reader.

Another interesting, and currently pertinent, item is the term “misdemeanor” when applied to impeachment. In context, a misdemeanor is not necessarily the consequence of breaking a law (as in the legal sense), but more exactly just misconduct, such as lying to congress or corruption. No actual law must be broken to be impeached, the bar only sits at conduct unseemly of the position.

Yes, I'm a bad citizen, I've paid less attention to the actual written constitution than I have the Bible. You see the irony? The sad part is that I don't think I am in a minority in this. How many households have Bibles, versus how many have a textual copy of the Constitution? Incoming (legal) immigrants have a deeper understanding of our country's most important document than we (born citizens) do. This is especially interesting in an age where we clamor for increased constitutionality in our government, who wants to discard it completely it often seems. How can we tell someone to respect principles that we, ourselves, are unfamiliar with?

* The spirit of this move also bars states from changing their drinking ages, speed limits, and a plethora of other “soft control” enforced laws. This aspect is largely negative. I have the idea that states should participate in a form of “ideological market”, with various locally reflective laws, and thus reaffirming their identity by luring like minded individuals, and serving as a test-bed for new legalistic, and moral, systems. Popular states will make more tax money, and grow in power, forcing less reflective states into line, without the influence of an aloof, and disconnected, federal government. Laws should reflect the needs of the governed, and NOT the ideological will of the governors. Politicians are often moved to action for our perceived “protection”, and lose sight of the mandate that gives them power, the will of We the People. They think they know better, and are some sort of parental figure to the people, and not just a mere servant. Moving the power closer to US, is generally a good thing.

Civil laws should be the domain the federal government, to keep states from oppressing any aspect of their population. The federal government should also serve as a check against state tyranny. While states themselves should regulate themselves in regard to the morals, ethics, and themes, of their individual societies. If a state votes to legalize gay marriage, ban abortion, or legalize various drugs, then who is the impersonal federal government to disagree? This is largely a hypothetical view, since there are definitely thorny issues involved. Is loosening our larger identity and country loyalty a good thing, it was, after all, an indirect cause of the Civil War? What ARE our rights, and where will the sweeping inclusion move next? Perhaps the ability for homosexuals to marry is a civil right, and this the government must protect against states infringing on it, the same goes for both sides of the abortion debate. A women might really have the right to choose, or the fetus might really have the right to life, and thus either party would need to be protected federally. These contentious issues, thus, remain so.

A Tentative Grounding for Human Rights

2007-05-09T02:08:00.001-07:00

Ethics, themselves, are probably universal, but it is what we define as worthy of their consideration that changes.

These universal ethics are probably the result of evolutionary pressures, and thus completely innate, meaning any theory of ethics would have to be descriptive, not normative. Also meaning that there are not to be confused with "Morals" which are socially, or institutionally prescribed (normative), and thus can vary from place to place and time to time.

These universal ethics would have to somewhat resemble Kant's Categorical Imperative, in that they are broad, and requires treating others as you would be treated. Including reciprocity and altruism, both of which contain an essence of mapping yourself onto others.

Thus ethics becomes a game of similarity, we map these ethics onto those we can feel familiar or similar too, people (and things) that we can identify with. This allows their application to vary from place to place, and from time to time. This would also explain why dehumanization is an important part of atrocities, and often precedes unethical behavior. We apply ethics to that which we consider "human-like", and things that do not fall into this class do not have to be treated ethically.

Anecdotally we can see this in various behaviors that we see as unethical today, such as slavery and the historical mistreatment of Jews. Slave owners were justified in treating blacks as animals because they saw them as such, whereas they still treated their, white, families and neighbors humanely, and ethically, precluding any real lack of ethics. This can also be applied to more modern situations, like how one can say "I believe in the sanctity of life", and "I believe in war" without a tone of irony.(1)

The paradoxical solution to universal ethics is that they are BOTH universal, and situational. Though it shoves "humanity" into a more nebulous form of being, one that can exclude similar beings, and include the animals and the inanimate (if suitably complex and familiar).

Universal ethics could be seen to by synonymous with "Human Rights", or at least the intrinsic basis to Human Rights. The basis for a system of universal human rights has been eluding me for some time, and this seems to be a potential answer to this problem, while avoiding a concept of human rights being merely socially constructed.

Again, this is a tentative idea, needing much more work and research. I just figured I throw it out there and see what nibbles.

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(1) As in many of the participants in the recent GOP Debates.

Obama Vs. MySpace

2007-05-02T13:23:00.001-07:00

I don't know why I've been so politicized of late, it seems that everytime I open my mouth lately some political polemic pours forth with the requisite amount of piss and bile. This post is no exception.

The beloved co-frontrunner of the mainstream Democratic party, and media darling, Barack Obama has decided to hijack a MySpace page from its rightful creator and owner, and then commenced (or at least his campaign has) to spread rumors about the sites original creator being "in it for the money", and allegation that he denies vehemently.

Yes, this is a rather small thing, MySpace is extremely insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Yet we can learn a lot about someone by their small actions, how they treat their associates. They original guy's MySpace page represented a genuine grassroots effort, developed independently from the campaign, and only out of a genuine passion for Obama's politics. The 160,000 "friends" were genuine and organic, representing people who actually are interested of Obama, without any political manipulations or machinations. For the Obama campaign to ruthlessly seize control of this shows that they value victory over ethics, or treating people fairly. A sad statement on the morals and ethics of Obama. Victory is not, nor ever, worth stomping on the common man, especially one who devoted his time and energy to your cause with no want or expectation of re-compensation.

It also highlights how "grassroots" is now being supplanted by the IMAGE of "grassroots", leading me to be wary of anything that appears as an organic popular movement, since increasingly it only is a manipulation by some powerful entity to get its way. Increasingly there is nothing genuine in the world, everything is some manipulation trying to use us as tools. Perhaps we shouldn't stand for this.

Obama, tangent aside, has never been my favorite, he actually is in the bottom of the heap, just above Hillary, as far as democratic contestants go. But thats a story in the works, my analysis of the democratic debates. I'm slacking, I know. To many causes to write about, too little time. But if I was a fence sitter, this would throw me off that fence, and into someone else's yard. Obama is against people, and for his own power, or at least that is the image that this fiasco presents.

For more reading, please see:

http://www.mydd.com/story/2007/5/2/93621/10103

http://www.techpresident.com/node/301

(Note: I generally try to keep politics away from Non Servium to keep it in the impersonal realm of thought. But lately I've been on an activism spree, so I feel I might as well mass-publish it. Politics are a valid realm of intellectual discussion, as well, so feel free to publically disagree.)

Technorati Tags: Barack Obama, Obama, Politics, MySpace, internet

Geek Ethics: A Modern Digital Mass Movement

2007-05-01T17:23:00.000-07:00

Its odd when you realize that there is a strange informational ethic involved with geeks on the internet. Every-time something is censored, over covered-up geeks propagate the information to the point where enforcement becomes futile. This can be seen with web-pages such as The Memory Hole, which serves to document changes in records, and disappearing public records. And most lately in the "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" fiasco.

To explain, "09:F9:11:02:9D:74:E3:5B:D8:41:56:C5:63:56:88:C0" is half of the digital key to decrypt HD-DVDs (the other half being unique to each HDDVD), allowing it to be played on unlicensed platforms. Much the same thing happened with regular DVDs a long time ago, allowing them to be playable on older Macs and Linux machines(since the encryption is copyrighted, only authorized paying vendors are/were allowed access legally, which amounts to extortion, and precludes smaller vendors from supporting the ubiquitous technology). This code (and the one hidden within the HD-DVD itself) make it possible to rip HD-DVDs to data files, playable on all platforms.

Some noble hacker discovered this, and now it has lead to a cascade of DMCA take-down notices, burying its mention in blogs and large news services such as Digg, basically government enforced censorship. Censorship of a NUMBER. Yes, for all its cryptic looks it is a simple number encoded in hexadecimal. For a silly analogy, lets say that someone develops a new technology based on a circle, they copyright this. Then some intrepid Greek hacker known as Pythagorus on the internet finds the secret number that makes this "wheel" possible, lets call his number π. The cartel that brought you the wheel decides to censor this number, banning all public use of it under threat of legal attack.

But here comes the internet, a group of libertarian amoral egotists who read to much William Gibson books, and for all their faults still buy the old hacker adage "information wants to be free". Nothing pisses of the internets like censorship. Thus EVERYONE spreads it, copies it, makes poems and videos of it, and thus transform it into the common place, and make it so ubiquitous that no one could ever remove its mention, ensuring its free existence in the public domain. For all their faults, geeks have this one thing going for them.

EDIT: Even Wikipedia is riding the censorship train. Which is VERY shameful. Wikipedia is supposed to be a repository for knowledge that is useful, and not just that knowledge that a corporation or government decides we should see for their convenience. This is very much like the China issue I talked about the other day, where American online companies behave unethically for their own interests.

Happy May-Day. In related news.

Edit: This entry is post-dated to when I originally posted it to my other (more informal) blog. In the mean time Digg.com capitulated to the wishes of its users, but only after being nearly crippled with activity. It is amazing what a small mass-movement can actually do, at around 12 noon (MST) Google showed around 1000 hits for said number, while now, a little over 24 hours later, it shows 316,000. Many of these are fallout from the Digg Revolt itself, but many of them are still independent pages, thus securing the number to remain in the public domain by shear numbers. Though this still could be hurt by the "take down notice" sent to Google. Even if this is blacklisted by the top search engine, it has reached enough critical mass to never go away. Like many other things, an attempt at censorship has cause an idea to become more known than it ever would have without it.

Technorati Tags: politics, media, internet, DMCA, rights

Dehumanization

2007-04-17T01:35:00.001-07:00

In America, today, humanity is slowly and quietly being annihilated. This is an insidious destruction of self-hood in which most of us are gleefully contributing too. This assault on being is being committed on several fronts, including pharmaceutical companies, the psychiatric trade, and the sciences, combined with the changing standards of how we work and find recreation. All together this represents a serious change in our operational episteme, or world view. The result of this shift is that the very idea of humanity, and how we see ourselves, is being radically redefined. This means that our being itself is changing, since how we define ourselves limits our potential modes of being.

Science and the pharmaceutical trade are slowly diminishing humanity into a series of blind and meaningless chemical reactions, at the expense of the reality of us being the masters of our own fate, and ultimately responsible for our actions and internal state. Psychiatry is slowly changing us into a series of chemical imbalances that we have no ultimate control over outside of various prescription regimes. The emphasis has shifted away from us struggling to control our nature, and thus ultimately to blame for it. We are no longer responsible for ourselves. This can be seen in medicine with its various "quick fixes" to aesthetic and health problems, such as obesity and distorted body image, replacing a willfully healthful lifestyle as a cure. In mental health we deal with problems with drugs, and a de-emphasis on any form of psychoanalysis or cognitive therapy, nor introspection into possible environmental causes of psychological ailments. We are seen as decreasingly culpable for our actions and predicaments, instead physiology and chemistry carry the weight of responsibility. The self is becoming a base physical construct as opposed to an individual.

The current crop of "evolutionary" scientists, and physical reductionists are adding to the destruction of self-hood by removing the aspect of choice from our very being and existence. Agency and self-hood are being replaced by invisible law, and a theory of illusionary being, where we have the illusion of choice and being, but actually this is instilled in us by Darwinism and blind adaptability. I have covered this ad nauseam in my various critiques of determinism. We have become mindless tools of natural law, and not agents free to act within their constraints. There is no longer any room for self-hood with in the constraints of naturalism and scientism. The self becomes a mere illusionary consequence of chemistry (and thus physics), and a long natural history. The consequence of this view is that our nature is immutable, and inevitable, and thus is meaningless to view us as being free to change ourselves. It takes the humanity out of human nature.

Between these shifting scientific perspectives we witness the "nature vs. nurture" debate shifting so far into the realm of "nature,” that "nurture" becomes a mere subordinate synonym of nature. Our mental being has become pure chemistry and physiology, which in turn is almost purely genetic, which is only the consequence of natural history. The self is now completely subordinate to science, and scientists. Gone are the brief glory days of nature being tied to nurture (and visa versa), where changes in your consciousness and willful behavior could influence your chemistry and gene expression, which in turn would influence your consciousness and behavior, in a complex feedback loop. This view is dying a rapid death at the hands of cognitive science, neuroscience, and evolutionary biologists (with the help of pharmaceutical reps). This first aspect of the on going episteme change is definitely worthy of closer philosophical scrutiny, but we will have so save that for a later date.

The second flank in this process is the change in the structure of our society, and our interactions with it. Where the first change is almost wholly philosophical, the second is environmental, and can be traced almost purely to the current conception of capitalism.

In our interactions with society, we are more and more dehumanized; we are seen more as data or as a part of a process to be completed towards the ends of some "greater" productive goal. This infects our day-to-day work experience, and our other myriad interactions with mass society. At our jobs we are more and more subjected to Marxist alienation, we do meaningless tasks tat are so compartmentalized that we often lose sight of the meaningful whole that we are participating in (if it indeed even exists). We have no stake in our work except money (itself an arbitrary symbol), and thus we fundamentally don't care. We get called associates, or partners, which is a thin mask to the fact that we are utterly expendable, we are mere means of production, and becoming more and more replaceable with cheaper systems (out-sourcing, or automation). We are paid the minimum to keep people working, as balanced with pure profit (the ultimate goal). Our well-being is irrelevant. Conversely our lives are slowly being redefined as pure consumption, our very worth is being defined by what we buy, and what products we prefer. Again, this is for pure profit, and no actual intrinsic benefit toward us as people, and as such we are charged the absolute maximum that will keep us consuming, regardless of various cost saving devices (usually resulting in us losing jobs or money).

This cycle has rendered us as pure consumers. Increasingly we are assaulted by invasive ads, when we seek recreation, when we attempt to commute, when we do anything. This is because we are, again, merely a means to profit, and nothing more. Increasingly we are carved into demographics (which we increasingly wear as a badge). This invasion becomes more and more subtle, no longer is it oblique and obvious, but has become subtle like various forms of artificial "word of mouth" campaigns, to elaborate games such as the marketing of the new Nine Inch Nails CD. This leads us to be suspicious of all forms of cultural conversation, since it could be a subtle trick to manipulate us. Advertisement has become part of our culture, even though it exists only to manipulate us for capital. Both our work, and cultural utility treats us as a means towards ends, and thus ultimately objectifies us, striping us of the respect and regard that comes with humanity. We are units of value, instead of the arbiters of value. We are raised from birth, now, to be perfect consumers, our subjective meaning is slowly being defined only in terms of consumption.

We add to this the apparent view that our governments have taken of us, where we only are tools to sustain various ideological systems. Our importance and protections become subordinate to corporate interests thanks to the ideology of supreme capitalism. The very systems that envelop us have taken to pure manipulation of their constituents (us) towards their own well being, at the expense of ours. We can see this in more and more forms of legislation, where our rights are legislated away in favor of ideological platforms, and corporate interests. Again, the individual has changed into a mere token to be manipulated, and not a being in-itself.

Worse, thanks to the pervasiveness of this new environmental paradigm we have begun to internalize this world, since we feel as if we must fit. We are losing sight that these systems and structures are in place to benefit us, and not visa versa. We are the ends in which they should be turning, since we permit their existence. But we while away more and more of our lives being "productive" towards some externally motivated ends. Constantly we use emergent technology to get more and more work done, even if this work does not benefit us in any personal sense. We feel that our efforts are wasted if spent on internal, or merely self-important activities, and not thing that our environment judges important. This can be seen in the popularity, and increasing amount of cult of productivity sites such as 43 Folders and Lifehacker. The reason why productivity as an ends in itself is an ultimate goal escapes me, shouldn't the value of that which is produced matter too, or the self-meaning we get from production?

This emphasis of environment over individual probably leads to the over-treatment of psychological conditions stated in the first section, we now struggle to fit in an environment hostile to our natures, instead of trying to change the environment to fit our needs. We view ourselves as powerless, and we view our lack of fit this alien atmosphere as a self-problem, even while denying our ultimate culpability for this problem. We are stuck between two dehumanizing paradigms. This results in what the sociologists call anomie, or the general feel of detachment from society and the world.

These two forces combine into a single phenomena whose main result is changing our definition of ourselves in a way that is alien to how we actually experience ourselves. Definitions are things of power, since they operationally define entities, and limit their possibilities. If we cannot see our capability of defining our own meaning, we risk losing this as an essence of our being, and then our world will collapse into meaninglessness. These forces represent a violent attack on the self.

The general result of this change is the removal of the idea of humans as autonomous agents, and also the destruction of the values that result from this previous view. In the past humans were the creators of meaning, living in an self-constructed sea of meaning in which we were the center. The primary values dominating this view were self-autonomy and freedom, which lead us to view the world and situations as ultimately changeable. The consequence of this was a feeling of personal responsibility, which could flow into angst or empowerment. We were the arbiters of value in the world, the creators of meaning, and with this view we were free to attempt to shape the world, and ourselves to better match our ideals.

If we removed the encroaching fog of dehumanization we might be forced to contemplate the meaning of this change. Generally definitions of human nature serve some ulterior purpose. Redefinition is a very utilitarian thing, it is benefiting some modern structure of power, and this should be questioned. Look towards eugenics*, slavery, and Medieval Christianity for further examples of historic redefinitions of man. The modern changes, like the past benefit some existent power structure. For all changes in episteme, the first question we should ask is "cui bono?"

A partial solution to this problem is to embrace our individual autonomy, and to carve out space for individually meaningful tasks. Also we must recognize that we are the ultimate ends of the social, economic, and political structures that hope to ultimately subvert us towards their ends, and force them to reconcile this fact. More so, we must realize that we have the ability to create meaning, even if many of these expression are now deemed worthless to society being that they are not for the ultimate ends of capital. The scientific front is more difficult to combat, and I will save that for a forthcoming article, but we still must approach psychopharmacology carefully since there are indeed real physiological problems that should be dealt with treatment. But a vast majority of prescriptions and diagnosis are ultimately hinged on the presumption that we have no control, and this is a myth that we must not take for granted. Most common modern psychological "epidemics" are directly related to us, as humans, no longer fitting to what our environments want from us, and our environment not supplying what we need as humans. We must change our environments, not ourselves, this will lead to empowerment, the ultimate enemy of feeling of futility.

The mental illness problem is deeper, though, since it has become a way to be special, as we can see in the increasing number of adults proudly announcing the fact that they have some trendy "illness" such as Asperger's or "Adult ADD", both of which are absolutely absurd, and probably purely mythological. This is a way for individuals to claim some uniqueness, to standout in the more and more faceless, and impersonal world. ADD (adult and child) and depression probably are mostly the result of the aforementioned lack of fit into the changing external world, which is pointed to by the rapid increase of diagnosis with the increasing application and pervasiveness of the above episteme, they are more signs of anomie than chemistry.

To close, I'll include the catch-phrase for my cure to our lack of self-meaning: "Don't consume, PRODUCE!" Don't be productive, don't take Prozac, go find a canvas or notebook, some paint or a pen, and grab control of at least a small portion of your reality. That blank slate is wholly yours, and no paradigm can take that away. Creation is the key to existence, we create ourselves, and hopefully through smaller acts we may discover this.

Technorati Tags: philosophy, sociology, anomie, culture, dehumanization, paradigms

Two Media Related Polemics on Religion

2007-04-06T03:35:00.001-07:00

Goto Section II, A critique of Dawkins' view on agnosticism.

I. Commentary on the Documentary "Jesus Camp":

If ever there was a frightening documentary which fills me with fear for the future this would be it. In this rather even handed documentary we delve into the practices that Evangelical Christians bring to bear on their children, turning them into little hyper-religious time bombs. While most children are busy playing in the dirt (as they should be), these poor children are being indoctrinated in abrasive fundamentalist and political principles, such as creationism, "anti-global warming", and the pro-life ethos. We see how their parents deprive them of all semblance of childhood, and instead instill a vaguely creepy religious fervor upon them, for the pure sake of "winning" some delusional "War".

Slightly tangentially there is a severe ethical problem behind this view of their children. They acknowledge using their children (or indoctrinating) towards their (the parents) ends. This is in violation with Kant's second formulation (or the "humanity formulation") of the Categorical Imperative:

"Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means." *

Treating humans as means essentially depersonifies them, and removes their autonomy. It turns people into mere objects, or tokens to be utilized for someone else's purpose, eliminating their self-sovereignty and agency.

Actually the Christians portrayed in this movie use martial terminology over and over, going so far as painting their children's faces in camouflage, and referring to themselves as "warriors", or an army. Who the enemy is, is ambiguous, but I'm guessing that it is everyone who isn't them, and by them I do not mean the pious, or even the Christians, but just their little extremist sect. This means that as far as their concerned the rest of humanity is their enemy. I am sure that I am not the only person to see the problem with this view. Ominously their views are not purely religious, it also is strangely politicized, early in the movie when on the parents is seen indoctrinating their child against the belief in global warming. How global warming is a religious belief eludes me, but I'm guessing it has to do with the single most fearsome aspect of these fundamentalists that I will speak on a little later.

Unlike the early Christians this is a fully totalitarian sect, they can be heard in the film to talk against democracy since it allows atheists (meaning even Christians who are not Evangelical) to vote. In the same scene as above their is an insidious aside, one that is easy to miss, saying that evolution should not be taught in schools, period, contrary to the front that they present saying that both "intelligent design" and evolution should be taught as rival theories.† All of this points to the fact that they have no qualms of elimination all dissenting opinions that differ from their own. Oddly for such a blindly patriotic group, this is essentially anti-American, especially from a group that all but idolizes the current American president for his perceived theocratic tendencies (which are, incidentally, hardly evident in practice). Politically this group also supports Israel and some of their more dubious actions for the sole reason that it will bring about the end of the world, how the end of the world can be seen as a positive goal I will leave to the reader. Evangelical Christians fulfill the definition of "fascists" with rather eerie, and ominous, exactitude. To call this sect a future threat to the freedoms granted by secular government would be an understatement.

The dangers presented by fundamentalists can be traced to three related features of their collective psyche. The first is a biproduct of all forms of extreme idealism, the misguided premise that you "know better" than the unenlightened masses, and thus have some right to dictate your version of reality to them, at the cost of their ability to judge for themselves, generally this is a road that leads only to atrocity. Any action perpetrated by fundamentalists (of any class, not just religious), is seen by the perpetrator as ultimately good, this greatly inhibits the ethical scope of potential actions, since idealists are always right, and doing good, in their own eyes. Doubt and introspection is immoral, and a breach of whatever ultimate purpose the fundamentalist subscribes to, thus unthinking action is acceptable, and encouraged. Again, like the use of children as future "warriors", this using other as a means, and not as their own ends, dehumanizing the very people that are being misguidedly "helped".

The second problem is the classic sociological principle of in groups and out groups, where every clique in society always values external forces as a threat, or enemy. This causes groups to feel almost paranoiac illusionary persecution ("our way of life is threatened"), and allows the group to lash out at any perceived threat to group cohesion as a mechanism towards a delusional feeling of self-defense. Once again we have a fallacious rational towards the ends of negatively effecting others.

The third feature is the most problematic, and can be seen in the apocalyptic Zionism of the Evangelical right, the fact that the after-life is a more desirable place than the here and now. In the light of some future paradise the physical and immediate world dims in importance, as do all of the living beings who currently inhabit it. Why worry about long term temporal problems when some glowing heaven awaits us? This view allows unparalleled opportunities towards purely self-serving actions and egotism. The rest of the world can be damned (and is, in there view), they are the chosen. This also plays into the first feature of their flawed consciousness, any action intended to "save" the heathens is appropriate and ultimately good, no matter that immediate suffering involved, since this world is less real than the potential one awaiting all who subscribe to whatever particular religion the fundamentalist follows (this is true mainly in the big three monotheisms, mainly Islamic and Christian fundamentalism, though).

On a more flippant note, it is a necessary fact that all death-centric religions have a built in safety valve: religious tenets against suicide. Being that the after-life is more desirable than the world the rest of us inhabit, it is not inconceivable that all of the followers would gleefully kill themselves to ignore all of the beautiful banalities that we are forced to endure in the mortal here and now. Sadly, even if this ban on suicide was lifted, many would stay around gleefully meddling with the affairs of others in the name of "saving" them, whether they want this or not.

Sadly, this is a rapidly growing 25% of the American population, a portion of the population with an unhealthy over abundance of political influence, and the gumption to use it for the harm of the rest of us who do not belong to their clique. This is further evidence to why we should shore up our educational system (sadly not for the benefit of their, mostly home schooled, children, who I fear are doomed). The only way to combat this militant extremist threat is to breed a competing cadre of children with a rational mindset, and an appropriate skeptical tool-kit. We also need an insurgence of secularists, to secure the protections from religious tyranny that the constitutional framers built into the grounding of America. Perhaps the rest of our political differences should fall by the wayside while we protect our very right to dissent in the first place. If worse comes to worse we can bask in the potential of America's influence waning, to protect the rest of the world from more harm and death caused by religious extremists, and their genocidal feelings of self-righteousness.

II. A Preliminary Critique of Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion":

While it can generally be seen as bad form to critique a portion of a book that one has not read in its entirety, I feel is appropriate due to its fit with the previous section on fundamental Christianity. Please bear with me, and feel free to ignore this, or correct me on any misperceptions I have due to my incomplete knowledge of the contents of Dawkins book. This (hopefully) small critique will mostly reflect an objection to two sections of the second chapter, "The Poverty of Agnosticism" and "NOMA" (On Stephen J. Gould's idea of "magesterium").

First off I level the same problems that is encountered on Daniel Dennett's like minded book, "Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon", which I covered and reviewed earlier. In both books science is assumed to be able to be capable of fully comprehending existence as a whole. This is quite an assumption, even from a wholly naturalistic stance, thanks to the infinite complexity of the subject under study, and the inductive nature of our basis of understanding the natural world. More philosophically we have no tool to judge the potential completeness of any coherent logical system (such a science), there is no tool that can recursively analyze sciences current, or potential, completeness. Yes, science is the best tool we have for understanding the world, but this does not make it the perfect tool. Also science is completely aloof on questions of "meaning", while showing its remarkable ability to answer the "how" and "why" of existence.

The greatest checks to any scientific theory is observation (empiricism), and predictability. But of late science, in general, and physics in particular, have been denying even these two checks for theoretical validity. This can be seen Leonard Susskind's book "The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design", where the author (an eminent physicist) proposes that empirical observation and theoretical predictability should not be necessary conditions to theoretical, or scientific, understanding. He opts, instead, for mere systematic, or theoretical, coherence, as a judge for validity. This is a weakness, since there is no guarantee that ungrounded theories accurately reflect the actual state of nature. Basically he puts modern science in the same shoes as the metaphysicians of old, denigrating scientists to mathematicians and the modern incarnation of monadologists. This is troublesome if we wish to claim the ascendancy of science.

Also his comparison of God (or your diving reality of choosing) to rather inane entities such as the tooth fairy and the Flying Spaghetti Monster, is fallacious and rather loaded. Neither of these fictions have the same weight of inherent incomprehensibility as any accepted deity. The idea of God, as a definition is innately ambiguous, and unprovable. Critiquing a deity whose vary definition can be defined as alogical is rather absurd. God is, as conceived by believers, outside of logic. This view, again, is based on a shaky assumption that logic is all-containing, that everything can be understood by it. I also fail to see how we can positively say that the universe would be different depending on the existence of god, or his nonexistence. With a highly interventionist deity this might be a sensible conclusion, but with a more passive "deist" deity this becomes more dubious, this flaw might be do to some misunderstanding on my part since he does hint at deeper enlightenment further on.

Let me be frank, I am not defending religion of any stripe. Taking the opposite view of Dawkins' I use the fundamental unprovability of deity as a sign of it's ultimate nonexistence. Armed with the philosopher Karl Popper's weapon of empirical falsifiability, used against God's built in ambiguity, I can stand solidly in practical atheist, or at least very strong agnosticism. God, as hypothesis, can not be disproved, or tested, which is a strong strike against it's relevance. God is a null set, and thus it's existence or lack there of is irrelevant in a physical sense, we must only worry about it's psychic reality (as a guide for it's followers actions, see above).

I have two other problems with the ideologies of both Dawkin's and Dennett, the two largest popularizers of atheism. The first is the perceived necessary connection between scientism (a quasi-religious faith in the universal power of science and rationalism, and the view that science can ultimately answer everything), and atheism. This, as I've encountered, is a common item of dogmatic groupthink in the contemporary atheism movement (as typified by the "Brights" movement), which serves to limit acceptance by more skeptical people.‡ Also both Dennett and Dawkins are basically the atheist equivalent of the force they will to combat, fundamentalists. So much is their fervor against the threat of religion (perceived, and real, as above), that they risk becoming what they fear. Both of them cross into the territory of evangelical atheists.

---

* Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, sec. 419, available from Project Gutenberg.

† I've touched on this issue previously, and sadly in terms that would obviously always be rejected by Christian extremists.

‡ This does not keep me from being a somewhat reluctant member, though this problem can be seen in this post to their forums.

Technorati Tags: religion, philosophy, reviews, jesus camp, atheism, agnosticism, fundamentalism, evangelicalism, christianity

Postmodern Eulogy

2007-03-15T00:49:00.001-07:00

Jean-Paul Baudrillard died on the 7th, apparently. Its always a tragedy when one of our unique and controversial thinkers die, especially in this day and age. Baudrillard can be seen as one of the fathers of post-modern philosophy and cultural studies, and the proponent of many controversial ideas. He personally was very influential to me, even in the parts of his philosophies that I didn't (or don't want to) agree with, especially his views of the Hyper-real and simulacra which many of you have heard me rant about nearly daily. He may also be seen as one of the last of the great contemporary wave of French intellectuals which started late in the 19th century.

Agree with his avant-garde theories or not, he was an intellectual force to be reckoned with. His work will live on if by nothing else but the shear weight of controversy that surrounds it, which, indeed, is a distinction.

For more about the man please refer to the SEP article, or to the articles on his page though the European Graduate School. While his philosophy was difficult, it is engaging to read, as he tried to discuss issues important to us, things in our culture and world, a thing most academic philosophers are loath (or frightened) to do.

Another light goes out in the darkening world.

Technorati Tags: death, philosophy. postmodernism, eulogy, simulacrum

On Aqueousness (the hydrodynamics of the soul)

2007-02-28T03:02:00.001-07:00

I was doing what I usually do, sitting around thinking in some public place (the best places for solitary activities), and realized a short coming of philosophy; philosophers. How can one hope to describe and understand humanity, when one is far from typical? By pondering "what is humanity" we automatically announce we have no clue what humanity actually is. Can a genius understand an idiot, or visa versa? As an idiot I cannot see the high falutin' thoughts of the thinker, and as a thinker and I cannot ponder how the idiot does not see. What do the blind see? Now I'm not posting our hypothetical philosopher into either pile, the jury is still out on that verdict.

This lead to a further thought, what can any of us ever say about humanity? We don't even experience our own selves being human. How can I say anything about you, and everyone else, when I can't really say much about myself. 99% of my existence is hidden from me.

We are water. Constantly changing and flowing, but somehow still stable things. We are in flux, yet are the same. Like a river, we have an identity (lets call it our banks), but our contents are constantly flowing past. "You can never step into the same river twice", to possibly quote Heraclitus. We ARE this flow. Like a water we follow the simplest path, down hill. The path of least resistance. For rivers this is gravity, for us it is being. We react to the terrain, but always to go down hill. Flow is being.

Some famous psychologist defines flow as those moments that your are lost in just being. You are your action, pure being without the taint of thought. Sadly Mihály Csíkszentmihályi has made the same mistake that philosophers have made throughout the ages, the mistake of thinking that we are primarily rational animals, privy to our existence. We exist in flow, we are our experience, and rarely ever step back (which too is only part of being) to see which way the river of being is flowing. Introspection is rare, and often illusionary.

Much of our awareness of ourself is past-tense. We smooth over flow to give ourselves a sense of autonomy (that dread term "agency" again). We try to structure the eternal self into some sort of effigy that we can point at and say "that is me". But our own unanalyzed existence is that of pure being. Introspection, for the most part, is turbulence.

Why do this? Because we are scared of the fact that we don't exist. Which is absurd, we do exist (water), but not in the sense we want to picture ourselves existing (some holy soul, or kernel of being). We try to fight the stream, and find only insubstantial fluid, and deceptively light resistance (momentum). The "we" we put above the stream is only more stream.

Am I going to accept this metaphor to the point of being vogue and denying free will? No. We are the totality of our own being, thus we can effect our own course. Down is a predilection, or habit, in us, unlike a stream. The easy path is not the only path, it is only the normal path. Nor am I going to do the other philosophically popular thing, and deny the self. The self is the totality (holistically) of being, the image of self contains the image of itself, ad infinitum, through this you emerge.

Technorati Tags: philosophy, being, zen, water

Body Worlds 3: Momento Mori and Art

2007-02-09T20:37:00.001-07:00

Welcome to Body Worlds, an exibit (an ossuary, a reliquary, a carnal house, art?) brought to you by the German Gunther von Hagens.

Yes, a crowded, claustrophobic winding gallery of corpse-stuff, some posed, some dismembered displaying all their normal or pathologic glory. From the walls hold banners with quotes from thinkers from Nietzsche, Kant, and Seneca, our greatest minds musing on mortality, amid neatly displayed relics of it.

Upon winding through the child oriented Phoenix Science Museum, getting your ticket stamped not once, but three times (a metaphor, perhaps?), you enter a dark gallery, with dark walls, teaming with middle aged human life. In the corner is a posed cadaver, muscles exposed, one bowed "crusader style" before a simple wooden cross, praying to the fine capillary filigree of a human heart, in the middle a row of medium height glass cases filled with various joins, the bits and pieces that we take for granted. People mill about in an orderly fashion about these exhibits, staring curiously, little speaker things crammed to their ears, as is the fashion.

Its all very... curious. Wander around a flayed female, crouched, ready to spring, behind her wondrously muscled buttocks the round sphincter, you can duck down and look up it, to her intestines, if it pleases you. The reality eludes. It still is very abstract, scientific, aesthetic. A large black banner on the wall, pictures of Czech ossuaries, catacombs of arranged bones, skeletal monks arranged in eternal prayer, a brief academic blurb on the changing culture of death, the ultimate abstraction.

The exhibit winds down blind corners, in the nooks sculpted corpses, some throwing javelins, drawing bows, dancing, skating, active even in death, completely exposed. Muscles bunch, tense, a moment away from doing, eternally away from doing. They never will, since they were injected with plastic, after the fluids were sucked out of them by a vacuum. Is saying their lifelike too much? Cursed to be in a single moment, a parenthesis, a pause, before unleashing the tension in their red, striated, muscles, but they are not cursed, since there is no they, as another banner tells us, via the dead voice of Nietzsche. He tells us, through the ages, that such thoughts are for children, like the ones playing with the interactive exhibit on Stanely Milligram's famous experiment.

A handful of the corpses seem aware of their own unlife, staring blankly (for how else do corpses stare?) at the myriad veins covering the severed head of some departed comrade, its (his, her?) spinal column gracefully covered with black silk, concealing... what? What is their left to conceal in this traveling menagerie? Later on, we come across what was once a man (as evident by the testes dangling from slender pale ducts, the poor limp penis) sneaking off with his own burial shroud. This might have been near the hanging intestines, or perhaps the ruptured aorta, to be honest, it all blends together after awhile. A horse is a horse, and a corpse is nothing but a meaty looking curiosity. Then there is the man holding his skin away at arms length, ether contemplating the facade of the everyday, or perhaps holding it away in disgust, the face visible in reverse, dangling at roughly knees, patella exploded out to expose the joint.

Its like Francisco de Zurbaran's "St. Francis of Assisi in His Tomb" (in the Milwaukee Art Museum), where the robed St. Francis sits, contemplating what can only be his own skull. The symbol of his own mortality. For us, our mortality is merely an abstraction, it isn't real. This exhibit slaps us in the face with it, its impossible to see humans an anything other than finite, insignificant, bits of walking and talking meat. Each of these exhibits point obliquely to our own mortality, that lung or kidney can only exist in a living body, once they sit in a display for us to gawk at, logic dictates that there is a corpse on the other side. Than man on a skate board, or that woman sectioned into thirds, these were once our neighbors, us. That fine lace of blood vessels at the end of that hand in a jar, that once caressed a woman, felt the fine skin of a child, picked the nose from which it was once connected. That cadaver hurdling a bar, those three cross-sections of brain jutting above the coarsely muscled and anonymous face, those used to, not long ago, feel, love, and get headaches that drove her to grab Aspirin, which coursed through that fist-sized bulge in her chest, the stomach.

This is death, refined. Think of it as freebasing mortality. It is repressive, here the dead out number the living. Everything wreaks of the taint of death (metaphorically, not literally, there is no small here apart from that of the air conditioning, and the teaming life admiring the display), there is no place to sit, get a clear head, without the site of mortality haunting you. Yes, it starts out as academic, but then these cadavers become more and more human. Academics can not hold, the fantasies we tell ourselves about death start to dissolve, leaving us with just this. Momento Mori, indeed. The careful anonymity of the corpses starts to digest itself, the fact that there is no biography, no faces, no names, to these bodies, make them oddly more human, and in that disturbing. Instead of being John Smith, it becomes John Everyman. Instead of an artful display of anatomy, we get Nietzsche's abyss staring into us.

Here no one smiles, there is no laughter. The concealment breaks down, like a long buried funerary shroud, everyone is affected. The atmosphere is oddly solemn, quite people, slowly wandering, their eyes downcast, surrounded by lively corpses, the solemn masses surrounded by the dancing dead.

In the small bits of pathology, you find skeletal fingers pointing at you. Decayed, lungs, black (literally) with emphysema, ruptured arteries, cervical cancer, brains warped with Alzheimer's, hydrocephalic brains. Pretty corpses, next to what will actually bring you down.

A darkened room, a row of jars, the fetus at one week, two weeks, 8 weeks. At 14 weeks have a human being, small eyes, delicate and perfect fingers. On the wall cases with babies, pulled from some dead womb, permanently posed on the verge of birth, but dead. They skipped the long, joyous middle bit called life. Imagine that 14 week old proto-human being sucked from the womb, those small bright blue eyes, its hard to be pro-choice in this room. Its hard to be pro-life in this room, full of... ensouled cells. Where can I stand on that abstract issue after seeing the subject with my own eyes? I still don't know.

There is no god here, just flesh, or rather the lack of it. We turn our eyes to the creator of this exhibit, who is he? What drives one to this?

What is my final impression? I don't know. It affected, but I'm not sure if it was positive, or negative. I recommend people to see it though, like it or not, it will allow you to see things you wouldn't, both physical and intellectual (is there a difference, the walls of brain cross sections beg differently). I warn you though, for a couple hours afterwards it is hard to see people as people, and not just containers full of... stuff. See that woman, as she walks down the road, see here muscles ripple, her tendons stretch... Wait... she has skin! Next time you see a steak, think of the similarity to your own meat.

Technorati Tags: body worlds, anatomy, cadavers, science, art, exhibits

Partial Solutions to the Immigration Problem

2007-02-06T14:43:00.001-07:00

Its been awhile since I've contributed anything to my small series on illegal immigration (see here and here, for the precursors to this current discussion.) But today I was having a conversation about earlier views of immigration, and how the current bunch of Latin Americans are different from more classical (but at the time equally reviled) immigration groups, such as the Irish or Italians. These differences are, for the most part, irrelevant, but this conversation did lead to a partial solution to the immigration problem, that caters to both the humanitarian problem, and the economic problems.

This solution is equality. I propose a law that forces U.S. employers, and local governments, to treat their illegal employees the same as legal U.S. citizens. Illegal immigrants should have the same minimum wage and insurance laws, and the same taxation, as the rest of the legal American workforce. This may seem like a simple solution, that would do little to help the actual problem, but it would have beneficial consequences for both the illegal worker population, and the public services straining under high number of poor immigrants.

By forcing the minimum wage on all workers in the U.S. we would remove the incentive to hire illegal immigrants. Illegal immigrants are hired because, simply, they cost less than American workers who are both legally entitled too, and expect, higher wages. By enforcing a universal minimum wage, hiring illegals would loose much of its grounds, there would be very little gain in staffing an illegal workforce over a legal one. Yes, immigrants would still be more willing to work for a minimum wage than non-immigrants, but with coming minimum wage laws this becomes less an issue. Forcing employers to give all employees insurance, too, would increase (or equalize) the overhead to hiring illegals, while giving the added benefit to opening up paid healthcare to the immigrant community. This measure is largely win-win, and is strictly a matter of enforcement, and not new legislation.

Included in this is opening up “workers rights” to all employees, regardless of citizenship. By workers rights, I mean primarily the right and protection of workers to form unions and go on strike. Protection being the primary concept, illegal workers must feel safe in protesting unfair work conditions in order to protest at all, since the consequences are higher for them that for unionized legal workers who do not have deportation hanging over their heads. This is problematic, since they are illegal regardless of what protections are granted to them in the workplace, meaning visibility and speaking out will always be problematic. For this problem I propose a (very) limited amnesty, only applicable to workers rights situations, this aspect would require legislation.

Employers who do not grant the above policies to all workers, regardless of citizenship status should be prosecuted and fined, as would any legitimate business employing legal workers. To remove the immigrant question for the moment, all we are talking about now is harsher enforcement on employers employing employees “off the book”, or “under the table”, which already is illegal, but with some added protection for illegals, whose situation is different.

Along with fair wages, insurance, and rights, illegal immigrants should pay taxes, both for income and property. This would both cover the services used by illegal immigrants (schools, hospitals, etc...), and bring more legal power to bear on employers, and other services that turn a blind eye to tax law when it comes to immigration (apartment complexes used by ‘coyotes’ in the Southwest). This is a solution to the humanitarian issue, where it is wrong to deny health care and education to those who need it, ethically, which is complicated by the financial reasons (large percentage of unpaying patients lead to decreased availability of healthcare to those who pay via taxes and fees), by forcing illegal immigrants to cover some of their expenses through taxation. This also addresses the problem with schools throughout the American Southwest, where teachers cannot keep up with the amount of students requiring ESL education, causing them to neglect English speakers in poorer schools.

Required universal taxation would also create a better registry, and documentation, of illegals, and allow a better method for judging their population, and distribution, which would increase the ability, and accuracy, of further legislation.

I realize that all of these solutions are already in the books, so this becomes a matter of enforcement, and not legislation. In the end this only amounts to a way to help the problem, while avoiding the problems with passing legislation, and keeping a civil face on the problem.

These minor solutions also address a contemporary problem in political ethics, the double standard modern society applies to themselves and others. I purposely omitted the word “American” from the previous sentence, since this is not a uniquely American problem, all cultures and governments. In the U.S., though, this is evident by the recent removal of the fundamental right of habeas corpus (by the Military Commissions Act of 2006) from foreign peoples suspected of “terrorist tendencies”, or in modern newspeak “enemy combatants”. Which seems a violation of Kant’s categorical imperative, and Jesus’ “Golden Rule”. Granted the previous two moral philosophies are simplistic and dated, it does make a certain amount of sense to regard others with the same expectations as yourself, and accord them the same rights, and ethical standards, you hold yourself too.

Technorati Tags: law, immigration, ethics, rights, debate, politics

Metablogging: Proposals and Introspection

2007-02-05T15:04:00.001-07:00

Problems and Introspection

I keep tossing about the idea of getting my own domain name, it seems it can be done rather cheaply (1.99-7.99/yr for .info or .net with various degrees of free hosting), but I keep running into a content wall, meaning do I really have enough to say to even justify that meager fee? Let me rephrase that, I know I have a lot to say (perhaps too much), but do I really have any thing worth reading (or people's time) to add to the already claustrophobic cacophony of the internet?

I mean this in both an (egotistical) marketing sense, and in a proper introspective sense.

Why would people seek out what I have to say? Why would people be willing to waste a couple mouse gestures, and a minute or so of their time to listen to me, or look at my art, read my rants? I already, on my blog break most of the marketing rules of web content (especially according to the various annoying "how to make you blog popular" things on digg), my content is generally not very useful, I'm not telling anyone how to fix anything, I'm not helping anyone live life, there is no breaking news, I really am not giving anyone anything they want/need to hear. My public ranting serves no public purpose. Sure there are little psychological tricks I can pull to make people stick around and read it, sure there are little technological tricks I can pull to make myself visible, and appear popular (in the internet sense, like MySpace users being popular for having 6gazillion friends that they will never meet or talk to, the blogging community has much the same idiotic concept). I refuse to do this, since I would have people participating in a gimmick, and not something genuine.

To me authenticity is more important that popularity, this line of thought dooms me in the modern internet which is driven by image, make-beleive charisma, and marketing techniques. But it seems I have a message no one wants. My only internet popularity success is a string of Photoshopped vintage porn, my rants, and philosophical musings fare much much worse. There is really no reason people need to read them, and they really don't bring much more to the table, it is only one (arguably unqualified) man's opinion on nature. Nothing more.

More philosophically, why do I care if anyone reads (views) me or not? Which can be simplified into, why do I bother making this crap public in the first place? My original goal (long long ago) was simply to change the world, which is obviously naive but expected from some crackpot druggy in high-school. Later it became to force a discussion, which can be either taken for the mutual good, or strictly my own intellectual development. I wanted to open a conversation about things people don't think about generally, show people new territory to explore, new questions to ask (questions, after all, are more important than answers). But for some reason even discussion seems too high a goal now, since it has been a rather complete, unqualified failure. Yes, I have had one or two good discussions that (I hope) left both parties enriched, but that has been it for this modern internet project of mine. Outside of encouragement (which is greatly appreciated), there has been no discourse.

This is partly the fault of the blog format, I know. Flat text is not the best medium for conversation, and the very feel of it, limits things to shorter answers. I don't know how to solve this, nor whether it would be worth my time to try. In the long passed days of the collaborative (and now, long defunct) Nonservium.org, the actual text of the rants served to bring people to forums, or a bulletin board, so multi-player discussion could happen. Even that, though, was mildly disappointing, since it never entered a self-sustaining phase, equal time was spent pimping it, as to writing for it.

Notice how the question of; "why bother?", was left unanswered? there is a reason for this, since I can't answer it really. I don't know why I bother trying to shove my hopeless questioning down anyones throat. Perhaps it is entirely self-serving, I think better speaking out-loud, I think better when I have an opponent, a discussion. I want to better myself on the backs of others, but I hold hope that it can be mutual. Perhaps I just want to be known to exist, like much of what exists on the internet, I want to stand up and scream "HERE I AM!". Perhaps a little of both of these. I honestly don't know, and it doesn't matter, I can no more stop it than I can willfully stop breathing. I create, I publish, always have, always will. I've been doing it since I discovered I could, sometime in the shadowed landscape of my past. Perhaps when I was 10 or 11 I posted some droll story (since fiction was my delusional forte then) on a local BBS, and it hasn't stopped since, and there is no reason to think it will.

Proposed Solutions

But how can I stop screaming into a perceived void? How can I open discussion?

I think the forum idea comes close, since it does fill a need. Every forum of ideas I run into while browsing through the net is a dogmatic quagmire of jaded groupthink, full of immature children hurling fallacies at each other for daring to transcend what ever particular 1-dimentional paradigm the discussion resides in. People think they want to discuss, but all they ever really want to do is fit in. But forums require people. And that is my problem.

I also am on this community kick right now. I don't want to dominate, I don't want a privileged position, I only want to facilitate other people's freedom. (to be pompous, I want to be the irritating grain of sand, forcing the oyster to make his pearl). How could I incorporate this?

I have some ideas. Think of it as the Interactive Art Project v.2, or as "open source" art, starting people with a seed, a basic image, that would be freely editable, changeable by anyone, in any way. This seed and its infinite iterations would be freely hosted, and could be freely distributed. Though this is not as powerful as I would like it since it is limited to one medium (digital). Think of it as a graphical Wikipedia, complete with revision history, and discussion. How do I implement this?

But for my prime interest, philosophy, how could I emphasize the same character? Since a philosophical idea is the same as the above concept, except on a deeper level. It is open to the community, it is the source of new ideas, it grows and changes with participants and times. It freely morphs, and changes, it belongs to everyone, and everyone shades its existence and meaning. Philosophy is not the subject of stodgy Ph'D's sitting in ivory towers, it is the business of all of us, since its topic is life, which we all are experts on. How to emphasize this, and more-so, make it fun?

Before I suggested a philosophic reading circle. I would still like this, if I could find away to remove elitist over-tones that surround the term philosophy. Open it up for all, allowing mutual growth and benefit, that would be the goal. This is partly doable thanks to deconstruction, philosophy does not have to remain in the dusty and obscure realm of reading badly written books, by old asses (Kant, for example), but can be gleamed by looking at us, and our artifacts. Bunnicula might say as much about us and the world as A Critique of Whatnot: an Ontological Treatise into the a priori nature of Teleological Proofs.

I also (as always) would want other people talking, participating, in a higher level function. Co-editors. This is to keep me from dominating, and keeping the venture from being a monoculture. The only requirement is the ability to write (draw, whatnot, perhaps EXPRESS is the best word), and the lust to question things at their basis. Applications are open.

Any other suggestions?

Technorati Tags: meta, blogging, ideas, proposal

The Ethics of Evangelicalism

2007-01-15T19:38:00.001-07:00

Lately I was having a discussion with someone about evolution being taught in schools, and how the religious alternatives don’t belong in science classes as alternative “theories” (as discussed in this previous entry), and it lead me to ponder the ethics of the creationists, and other religious fundamentalist groups that see it as their duty to force others to adhere to their religious principles “for their own good”.

This practice is especially seen today in “hotter” issues, such as abortion, evolution, stem cell research, and such, issues where the objecting side is more commonly religious, this can also be seen in morality laws and practices. I am using the term “evangelical” and “fundamentalist” loosely, in a sense that does not only apply to Christians, or any other fervent religious group, but to any person or group that advocates any subjective dogmatic policy as law for all individuals, assenting or not (such as Libertarians, and other political extremists left or right), since they all share a common thread of perceived ideological supremacy.

These ideological views are generally anti-rationalist, based on some doctrine, rather than empirical truth, and generally reject proof of theories to the contrary of their views, as we can see most prominently in the evolution debate, where religion rejects the scientific view only for the reason that they are contrary to their dogmas, even if they have a preponderance of factual, and empirical evidence. It’s like Sartrean magic (§247), forcing reality to conform to our views by fainting, or in this case; pure anti-intellectual denial.

A fundamental problem in debates such as these, is that the evangelical position holds no validity with others who do not accept the arguable core dogmatic premises of the group. Saying that that soul begins at conception doesn’t hold well against the atheist who doesn’t believe in the soul, for example. Theological moral arguments are limited in power to those who subscribe to the same version of theology as the arguer, as are any purely doctrinal argument.

Another problem is that dogmatic arguments often close off valid problems from inspection. When using a religious basis for debating abortion or stem cell research, the valid (as in non-doctrinal) problems are overlooked, in favor of more tenuous appeals to emotion or God, which to the rest of us is a weaker position. It is rather absurd to make generalized arguments using terms that only apply to the group from which you are speaking. Saying “Good Christians shouldn’t have abortions!” is only applicable to Christians, not to a more generalized secular audience.

Legislating from these positions is where the ethical problems rise, since it amounts to inflicting the moral consequences of ones doctrinal system on others that do not subscribe to the core of the system, leaving it groundless. Christian law should only be applicable to Christians, and no one else if they do not have the same religious beliefs. Not to single out Christians, this should hold true to all faith inspired laws, regardless of faith. If you are opposed to gay marriage (for example) on religious grounds, then don’t marry a gay person. There is no reason to legislate this for all people regardless of belief systems. This tenet is only applicable to you, and others of your particular moral set. If you could base this on universal grounds (such as logic, empiricism, and science), only then can this law ethically be applied to culture as a whole. Personal faith is not evidence enough to effect the lives of others, to inflict your will upon society as a whole.

Any imposition of will deserves close and careful scrutiny, and should be based on some rational, and objective, grounds, and not merely anti-rational dogma. Accepting that a faith system is real to an individual or group, we must generalize that this is so for all faith systems, even those opposed to ours. This is basic empathy. By forcing others to conform to our view of reality, we dehumanize them, we use them instrumentally towards our will. So even action taken “for their own good” can be destructive, no matter how good the intentions, since it takes away the fundamental humanity of others, their right to choose by their own view of reality.

Until there is an objective measure of the value of various faiths (never), one can never say with 100% certainty if their idea of goodness is better than any other competing version. Thus we must resort to proven methods of generalization to apply ethical systems to society, with an eye towards the balance of individual sovereignty and the health of the society as a whole. Government, as a rule, should ignore all faith-based legislation, and protection of the soul, since as stated this is highly debatable. Society (and thus government) represent the whole of the body of society, and thus should be immune to the various spiritual ideals of subsections of society.

The protection of the soul is the duty of religion, which is a function of community and family, not government. Religion is an individual choice, not a forced obligation.

If a religious sect want to deny certain scientific theories and hypotheses that too is their right, within their own religion. Science exists as a common ground, as it is based on empirical evidence as opposed to subjective revelation. meaning it appeals to a larger group, as a whole, than any single doctrine. Science also has several grounding facets that allow it to function as a better grounding of knowledge than religion. Neither stance (the scientific or the religious) have the ability to refute the other. Observed facts stand regardless of spiritual system, or religious doctrine. The same goes for the feelings of religiosity, which stand on ground other than that which science examines.

The problems our society faces come when these two forces collide, unabashed rationalism versus the beliefs of the religious, this generally is the fault (to be honest) of religion, whose dogma on the world is often threatened by scientific findings. Historically this can be found in the censorship (and murder) that resulted from the heliocentrism of Copernicus, Bruno, and Galileo, and more modernly through the religious suppression of the theory of evolution, and various fields of biological research.

This clash is not the problem of science though, it is the fault of the inflexibility of religion. There is no greater sin than denying truth, because it is not convenient to your group, and if your group is so inflexible as to not be able to yield to facts in the world, then so be it. Censoring truth for your own power is never excusable. Even the Catholic religion can accept evolution within a theistic framework and even admit the truth value of science, showing that the newest naturalistic findings and faith are compatible on a high level. This can also be seen in Judaism, where there is more an openness towards the reconciliation of scientific fact, and religious reality.

Yes, certain high level scientists are also guilty of spreading this antagonism, such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, who can be considered anti-religious, which amounts to another dogmatic view, being that they are incapable of proving with any scientific rigor that there is no spiritual reality. Their beliefs are just as rational as those who deny facts for the sole reason that they are incompatible with their religious beliefs. The two aforementioned atheists can be called evangelical atheists, and suffer all of the flaws of evangelicals of all stripes, the blind dogmatic acceptance of their own correctness in matters unprovable, and the general inability to live-and-let-live.

There is no war between religion and rationality, until someone perceives there is, it is not an intrinsic feature of human experience. The war arrises only when the unimaginative, and self-righteous minority feel their narrow world view threatened. The healthy response to to allow novelty, accept others experiences, and always admit the possibility of being wrong.

The religion vs. rationality debates (on all levels, and topics) owe much of its existence to some basic social-psychological principles that come with so-called social identity, which is the reinforcement of the group identity by delineating opposition, creating an “us versus them” mentality. Perceiving forces hostile to the group in which you identify serves to strengthen group bonds, and direct action. Opposition defines the group, and threat justifies its existence. This arises because individuals stake some large portion of their self-identity in group identity and membership. This dependence on external groups is a weakness, and unnecessary to a healthy life, and is avoidable with the healthy development of ego.

Technorati Tags: science, evolution, ethics, law, politics, religion, fundamentalism, evangelical

Video Games as Art: Revisited

2006-12-15T16:34:00.000-07:00

Browsing the on-line articles at the American Society for Aesthetics' website, I came across an article by Aaron Smuts titled "Video Games and the Philosophy of Art", where he discusses the current ambiguity and half-heartedness in determining whether videogames could be considered art (philosophically), a top that I discussed earlier, and that originated a brief experiment in interactivity (as discussed here). He, too, spends some time on the topic of "interactivity", and states:

...video games are possibly the first concreative, mechanically reproduced form of art: they are mass artworks shaped by audience input.

He also points out that to argue for or against possible aesthetic values in videogames, one must first stake out a definition of what a videogame actually is. This, indeed, seems an area that needs work. Ineed the whole point of the brief article is to discuss how underdeveloped this idea is, even when it contains and exemplifies some of the core problems and issues within the field of aesthetics.

This lack of real debate is probably due to the fact that people are resilient towards change of the status-quo, especially when their professional life has been spent analyzing long existent forms. New idea require new techniques, and substantial risk for making embarrassing mistakes. The entry of the upstart videogames into the aesthetics debate is probably just a retelling of the entries of film and photography into the hallowed realms of art. Both of these mediums, like video games, encountered strong resistance and derision when first presented as an addition to what was classically defined as "art". Eventually, though, they became a topic of critical discussion and analysis. I see the same fate for videogames, though it may take longer than film and art for the very thing stated in the quote above, the fundamental novelty of the emergent art form. Film and photography were similar to existent arts (stage and painting, respectively), while video games are largely unique. They could, though, be seen as a mishmash of various existent aesthetic mediums, such as narrative, performance, and such.

In this light video games could be seen as the culmination, or synthesis, of aesthetics. Combining aspects of everything else we call an art. There is complex narrative, visual art, music, the structure of timing, and several unique metrics which would assuredly arise as unique to this particular medium.

I agree with Mr. Smuts, this indeed is a field that need serious philosophic scrutiny.

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, inquiry, philosophy, videogames, games

Idealism as Golden Calf.

2006-12-06T13:29:00.000-07:00

Today, on MSNBC, they had one of the guys from the Baker/Hamilton Commission, I think it was Edwin Meese, the former Attorney General under Reagan. I can't find the transcript on MSNBC.com, but it was something along the lines of:

"throughout most of my career we have been fighting the same people. In World War II it was people who quoted Mein Kampf and shot at you, then it was people who quoted Marx who would shoot you in the back of the head, now it is people butchering the Koran and trying to kill you. Its the same people, but different books."

Again, this quote is butchered but I tried to get it as close as I could remember from my sleep, and hangover addled state.

We can add people quoting the bible and killing millions in its name. Or anyone trying to screw over everyone for a mere idea, such as libertarianism, God, capitalism, communism, any "ism" really. Idealism is the scourge of humanity, when we grasp a "big idea" we do so at the cost of the small ideas such as humanity, and reality. When we attempt to shape the world "for its own good", as guided by some grand thought, we become nothing more than mere tyrants. From our lofty hight we loose sight of the toll our ideas cause on real people, people suffering to make your abstraction a reality.

While some ideas have done great things, and moved the world, most of them have lead to suffering. What is the difference between these two classes of ideology? How is universal suffrage different from eugenics? How is the Magna Carta different from the Turner Diaries? One set of ideals (the good ones) have human well being at their core, they spring from humanity, while the other desire to shape humanity towards them. A good way to illustrate this difference would be say that there are "ideas that are controlled by humanity", and "ideas that control humanity".

Sometimes we live in our heads, in the realm of abstraction, rather than the real world, comprised of people and suffering. Sometimes an idea is so powerful that we lose track of what actually matters, people and suffering, compassion, love, beauty, our common humanity that we share with all individuals. Ideology is the ultimate sin.

Along these lines... We entrench ourselves within our various ideologies, creating a false "us vs. them" dichotomy. Republicans vs. Democrats, liberals vs. conservatives, Christians vs. secular humanists, the poor vs. the rich, etc... We get so busy defending our select ideology, that we forget to actually step back and see what we are defending, to see if it REALLY is worth defending. We accept it as dogma, as biblical truth. It becomes another blind ideology to use to subject humanity to our view of how it should be. We are right! We are the creators of the world. We are our own tyrants, subjecting ourselves to a false idol of our own devising. We need to keep in mind the human effects of any ideal we hold.

Technorati Tags: compassion, eugenics, idealism, philosophy, politics, rants, society

Musings on Psycho-Pharmacology

2006-11-29T19:47:00.000-07:00

An interesting thought struck me the other night during a discussion on the medication of mood disorders, this thought was "What will we think of the current pharmaceutical treatment regime in 100 years?" While this question is purely hypothetical, and completely unanswerable, it does open up interesting avenues of thought. What is the chance that we might someday compare today's psychopharmacology with the eugenics of yesteryear? Oddly this is not as silly a comparison as it sounds at first blush, there are a disturbing amount of ideological similarities shared between these two areas.

Just like we can now look back on the racial views of the past with a large measure of understandable disdain and distaste, we might look back on today's psychological, and biological model with similar distaste. Both models revolve around the idea of a mythical ideal human. The difference is that in the past this model was racial, and based on physical characteristics, and today the model is based on a purely statistical profile. "Inferior" racial characteristics has been replaced with deviation from various physical and affective norms. In the past the "inferior" people were sterilized, or murdered, today deviation is medicated, or operated to bring us to conformity with some mythical peak of the bell-curve.

Eugenics was a social solution, whereas the current medical model is is a personal solution, both of these models of what is ideal humanity are both complete mythology. There is no master race, nor is there and ideal affective state, or physical ideal. In a sense both the mythical master race, and the idea of an ideal psychological state are forms of tyranny. Both in the more philosophical sense of the tyranny of a mere abstraction (an idea, an ideal) over individual persons, and in the more immediate sense of being forced to conform to authority (in this case the authority of collective opinion) at the cost of the freedom of the individual.

Granted that there are severe differences between eugenics, and medicating mood disorders, no one has yet been killed in the pursuit of affective idealism. But in a sense the current ideals are worse, since they subject individuals to norms, it is a more personal, and pervasive, form of tyranny. It changes our very view of ourselves, it makes us feel deficient and flawed. Being it is based on a statistical ideal, it turns all of us into deviants, and we believe it. We ignore, then and now, the fact that humanity is variant, we have moods, we all have different affects, looks, skin colors, etc... This is not a weakness, it is the way things are, it is no more a weakness than having thumbnails. Our so-called racial differences serve a purpose, as do our affective and psychological states.

Related to this is the increase of plastic, and other cosmetic, forms of surgery. It is far easier to change our appearance, than to actually be healthy, or accept our superficial, or perceived flaws from some celebrated ideal of appearance, and ideal that no one naturally meets. This ideal, in its very being as an ideal, matches none of us, it is not applicable to any real person. This has reached a level of absurdity, as seen by labia reduction surgery, testicular implants, and more absurdly anal bleaching. I wish I was making these ups, but sadly real people are fooled into actually getting these procedures done to them, just as they are fooled into taking taking anti-depressants for minor, and temporary (and completely normal) moods, or doping there children to behave better in a deficient education system. We've fooled people into thinking that there is something wrong with them, as opposed to forcing our racist opinions on them. While we were against diversity with eugenics, with terrible human costs, today we are against the very concept of the individual.

As a related quandary: Individual misery (or deviance) springs often from the structure of the current society failing to meet the needs of the individual, or even our core humanity. But the prescribed cure is US changing to cure the problem, as generally dictated by society. The reasoning goes: We are broken because the structure of society failed us. This irony is made deeper because WE are the masters of society, society is nothing but a collective noun for US. This is a nonsensical solution to an inane problem. Is the society as ideological entity really more important than its very real constituents? If we were to buy defective pants, missing one leg, would it make more sense to chop off one of our legs to make them fit, or to return them as defective? This is our current medical dilemma, and we proudly choose the former solution!

If our problems (such as anomie, and stress) spring for social structures not meeting our needs it would make more sense to change the social conditions to better meet our needs, rather than labeling us aberrant.

Oddly, after pursuing this line of thought, I picked up Dr. Ronald Dworkin's book, Artificial Happiness: The Dark Side of the New Happy Class, which is a critical view into a related topic, the rise of treatments of mood, creating a class of people who are happy for no real reason. There is a dissonance between there environment, and their affect. It has become far easier to change ourselves artificially, rather than fix the actual environmental causes to our problems. Moods, such as unhappiness, are essential to our lives, they are like the physical sensation of pain, they warn us that something is wrong, and something needs to be fixed, without them we put ourselves in unsafe, and undesirable situations out of pure ignorance, to our own detriment. Even the unpleasant things in life serve a purpose. Dworkin blames this primary care doctors treating human affect as an "engineering problem", something purely chemical. This is a false view of the human mental life. We are more than chemicals, and our problems are more than a neurochemical mistake, or mythological unbalance.

--

For more about like topics: About a year and a half ago I wrote a small (and contentious) article for the website Kuro5hin, the article touched upon potential impacts on creativity from the use of pharmaceudical drugs to treat psychological ailments such as depression and ADD/ADHD (the original, complete, draft is now available through Google Documents, here).

Technorati Tags: antidepressants, eugenics, pharmacology, philosophy, plastic surgery, psychology, saddness, society

Musings on Incomprehensibility.

2006-11-13T19:24:00.000-07:00

I've been so long in posting. I have been either busy, or lazy. Odd how these come at you at the wrong times, when you want to be lazy life happens, and when your being blissfully busy, all you want to do is take a time out and contemplate your navel. The ironies built into life never cease to amaze.

The text below are merely notes, I post them out of laziness and guilt. Feel free to comment, to help me whip there formlessness into some semblance of shape:

Alt Title: Observations (on a busy day) [from notebook]

We Each live imprisoned within ourselves, bodies. Escape is impossible, we are enslaved by body sensation, experience, a wall of distance separating us from the external, other bodies, PEOPLE. We can never UNDERSTAND (or in the jargon; TRANSCEND) beyond the walls of self-hood. We are doomed to be ourselves. To only experience the world fettered by our own finite context.

This is a far more profound and immediate form of "angst" than proposed by the existentialists. Their angst is only an abstraction, and to be avoided by merely being ignorant of any so-called meaninglessness, and mortal finitude. Refutations: Here and Now is IMMEDIATE. We exist within a finite moment wholly day-to-day. To step out of this and view it in context to our ultimate mortality is a step into abstraction, hence less real. It is a meta-thought or context. As to meaninglessness: this is the opposite, life is too full of meaning. Meanings shift, collide, melt away. Day to Day existence is infinitly layered with meaning. In the Here and Now meaning is dictated by need. Only in stepping back is meaning neccesitated in any greater sense.

These meanings are real. The temporary, shifting ones. They function and effect, and thus are real.
The bigger he picture (as function of abstraction) the more complex meaning becomes.
There is no THE (as in ultimate) meaning. This is mythology.

IMPOSITION is to a great extent, the operating principle of society (as in interaction with the other). Hypothesis: we see our own "walls", and thus generalize them to others. We know we can never know the other, so likewise is it for them towards us. Thus we make ourselves known by imposing our projected image of self-hood upon them. We inflict ourselves.

In part we do this to create a social construct of our unknowable (subjective) self into social reality. This is imago, and an exercise of Nietzschean power
We make ourselves in our own image. We make others in a bastardzation of our own experience and their imposition of imago upon us.
We often come to beleive our own projection, forgetting US as thing-in-itself. We, in a sense, project ourselves upon ourselves. We create ourselves, thus our context, and thus the world (as meaning, as personal reality).

Observation #1: We do not mirror nature, nature mirrors us!
We like the surreal - the avant-garde - because it is art like existence. Open, interpretive, ever-changing. Almost any meaning is possible, but there IS no meaning for the plethora of meaning. Good art, like life, leaves the mind grasping, gasping, hungry, and incomplete. It foils rational solutions threatening uswith the great howling void of unreason with lures of fulfillment, understanding, and enlightenment.

There is no illumination, just endless, beautiful, mirk.
Art is only time humans are honest enough to embrace the fundamental ambiguity of life.

Observation #2: All knowing is a lie. People are a lie. Understanding is the most fundamental lie of all lies. Beauty is the only truth.

On some level we all yearn to escape the flesh, the mind, obligation, imposition. To be free within the world, actually TOUCHING existence. Freedom and transcendence, this has been our secret dream, always.

Our species is cursed. We are born, thrust into the incomprehensible alienness of existence, perpetually lost and confused. And it is all down-hill from there. Thus we lose ourselves in games, we bury ourselves in the warmth of second hand mythologies, and the darkness of the here-and now. From time to time we see light and half-heartedly rattle the bars of our cage, then quietly rebury our heads in the sands.

How to escape? Like the Zen Buddhist. Wrap your mind in the incomprehensibility, and wander blindly until you feel the warmth of the sun on your face. Get lost.

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, beauty, existentialism, philosophy, life, existence, zen

ReReading Kaufmann

2006-10-26T01:46:00.000-07:00

Today I decided to hide from distractions and read, I figured that the world could damn well exist a day without informing me about its constant trivialities and mundane aspirations. Seems I was right, since it seems to still be here.

As for my choice of reading material, it was an old (1958) book, I read along time ago, when my interest in philosophy was just beginning, Walter Kaufmann's Critique of Religion and Philosophy. Kaufmann is perhaps best known as the foremost Nietzshe scholar and translator Kaufmann was (and still is) rare among philosophers, in that he has a brilliant command of language, and frequently uses humor in his texts. This Critique is also interesting, since, in at least the first section, he attempts to underline what philosophy actually is, how it is written, and how it should be read. He underlines the still-existant problem of the divide between modern analytic (anglophone) and existentialism (continental), and proposes that is it rectified, becoming more whole. He compares each school to "half a Socrates", amusingly, and oddly accurately. Both are portrayed as essentially childish, and bullishly incomplete.

It is interesting to re-read this text years later, with much more experience and readings in philosophy, I uncover thoughts that I, today, take for granted but must have struck me as obscure years ago, when I had no knowledge of the disciplines founders or range. Today his book is oddly simplistic (which is a compliment), yet packs more nuance, and more ideas about the discipline itself. Allowing us on the inside to look back at ourselves, and those on the outside to see the noble goal of philosophy. I fully recommend it to all who read this, from the philosophically inclined, to those with an interest.

There are some strangely presaging moments in the first third of the text (that pertaining primarily to philosophy, language, and the arts), outside of his critique of the rift in contemporary thought (just now being rectified by people of the likes of Richard Rorty). His idea of the social source of emotional categories is strangely, and eerily familiar today, it could have been written yesterday...

"Today world literature with its infinite variety is being supplanted more and more by the relatively few, unsubtle stereotypes of Hollywood, the radio, and television; and millions of young people get their notions of love and valor, dread and wrath, from the undifferentiated, indifferent performances of ephemeral idols whose body measurements are widely considered more important than their patent lack of any talent to portray emotions."

It is amazing that this quote was written almost 50 years ago, and has not lost its edge, even if it hasn't had the dire consequences that Kaufmann predicted.

Also interesting is his alignment of philosophy and poetry (and art as a whole), something rare in contemporary American philosophers, this juxtaposition being more common in those odd continental types. He aligns philosophy, art, science, and poetry into one common axis, the axis of butterfly like flight, and escape from the dust that most mortals are doomed to inhabit.

"Men are so many larvae, crawling, wriggling, eating-- living in two dimensions. Many die while in this state. Some are transformed and take a single flight before they settle down to live as ants. Few become butterflies and revel in their new found talent, a delight to all."

He goes on to compare philosophy to rebellion from the norms of society, and what we take as common sense. Truth is freedom. Truth is rebellion. It is the constant war against convention, with the sad caveat that those who succeed in rebellion will become the new convention to be rebelled against. On and on, for eternity.

"...there can be no definitve philosophy that has a future. There is no definitive art or science either. These enterprises are their own reward."

Speaking of: I'm thinking of trying to start a philosophic-ish reading group. Nothing too heavy, but reading ligher books with decent content and discussing them. No Kant, more in the Camus, Kafka, and non-fiction arena. Nothing boring for those with moderate experience, and nothing to daunting for those merely interested in higher concepts, and questioning the preconceptions of life. Would anyone be interested?

Technorati Tags: art, books, critique, experiement, philosophy, poetry, kaufmann

Summary of the Interactive Art Project

2006-10-11T03:00:00.000-07:00

I posted the pictures of the previously outlined project on interactive art to my Flickr stream, I would have posted them directly here, but my blogging software is misbehaving. For your convenience, I will also link them individually below, followed by a brief write up of my impressions from the event.

The sign for the event: as you can see, no expense was spared, though this also served a secondary function of keeping the atmosphere of the even informal, which we concluded would be more inductive to participation.

The following two were taken at the end of the evening, thus show the partially completed project (though the art will be replaced at the next attempt at the project:

The original project wall: The original wall was two sheets of cardboard, but these filled up rather quickly. Also the participants were unwilling, to a degree to arrange the work for space, or to post pictures on farther areas, so some manual readjustment was needed by the organizers.

The overflow wall: Towards the middle of the five hour event the space on the original surface was pretty much full, so we needed to move to a sign advertising an up coming proposition on the ballot.

I wrote up an unofficial reaction on my LiveJournal page, but will try add some further reactions here, later. As I stated in the unofficial write-up, the event was so overwhelming, and contrary to expectations that grasping its full import is difficult. Needless to say, the event was a smashing success, with over 125 participants in roughly 5 hours, even with an ad hoc set-up.

The amount of actual appreciation was mind-boggling, with individuals not participating in the even taking time out to thank us for our idea. At one point in time people started admiring the actually display or works itself, acting very much like they were in a gallery, examining individual works, stepping back and admiring the whole, and discussing the work with others.. At this moment the display became ART itself, and not merely a collection of public created art. this was overwhelming, to say the least.

Also the fact that all age groups, from approx. 4 to approx. 75 participated, as well as individuals of all skill levels, and levels of artistic experience, from children to people established in the Phoenix art community. Another thing that struck me as important was the fact that this display was unique in not discriminating or demarcating art of various talents, the 4 year old's piece could sit next to the established older artist's with no overt or external markers differentiating them. This is something, I feel, that was unique, at least to the local community.

Part of the success of the project was owed to two factors, the first of which was that we were the only free activity in the full Art Walk, and the only activity asking for artistic participation as opposed to spectatorship. It gave individuals a chance to actually participate in the event.

As that this was a prototype of the idea, or a proof of concept, we will be setting up for the next First Friday in Phoenix, with a modified set-up, and a more prominent placement to see what limits we run into (outside of technical) in the allotted time. After this, several variations of the communal art idea are in the works, thanks to rabid outside interest and involvement.

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, community art, experiement, interactivity, philosophy, events

A brief blurb on Power.

2006-10-05T13:18:00.000-07:00

Life is about power. Everything is control.

There are two types of power, the power that sociologists (and Foucault) talk about, and subjective, or individual power. They may or may not be different faces of the same coin.

Sociological power is nebulous, and uncontrollable. No one HAS this power, this power just manifests itself through them, they are controlled by it, as well all are. All actions are in response to, and thus manifestations of this power. The aims of this power is itself, for its own sake. Thus protesting the state of power serves the power, even while seeming against the state of power. Protesting is an autoimmune response, it allows power to strengthen itself in reaction to opposition. Deviance is also a manifestation of power, it sets up an allowed outgroup in which to contrast conformity. These outgroups must suffer, but only suffer as little to allow their existence. There is no escape from this form of power, since even escape is motivated by it, and thus an expression of it. The ends of this power is... I don't know. But it influences our very being, it creates and shapes us.

The other type of power is interpersonal. It is us attacking our own lack of real power. It is us inflicting ourselves on others as means of justifying our existence. It is us trying to claim some control over our lives, and more importantly our environment, through controlling others. I call this inflictive power, in that we inflict it upon others, we subject others to our will. This comes close to Nietzsche's Will to Power (Der Wille zur Macht). We force people to follow our schedules, restrict their access, force them to contend with ourselves, generally try to make them conform to our will. We can do this through constant self-referal, an attempt to control others image of ourselves, we can do this by subtle psychological manipulations, or in more extreme cases through rape, murder, and other acts of violence. This is constant, and inevitable, it is a prime aspect of human nature, the infliction of will upon others.

Contained in this the creative ego, our constant self-shaping. We shape ourselves by presenting an image to others. We inflict some version of who we want to be on others, hoping that they reflect it back upon us. Our very act of self-creation is an infliction of our will upon the other. Our very being is dependent on subjecting others to our will.

Every single one of us is in a constant state of both submission and dominion. We are constantly controlled, and controlling.

Nietzschean power is a reaction to Foucaultian power. Since we are powerless before pervasive power, we must struggle to maintain the myth of control, the shaping of reality to the contents of our minds.

Technorati Tags: Foucault, Nietzsche, philosophy, power, reality, sociology

Tentative Definition of Art

2006-09-20T23:55:00.000-07:00

In the scheme of writing a larger work (a critique of post-modern art) I decided that an operational definition was necessary. This is about all I could come up with, that is inclusive to what we generally call art. The ultimate goals of the work is dividing what we call art, from what actually can be Art. I'm using the caps distinction like philosophy generally uses "Truth", and "truth". I also want to explore the experience and mechanics of art (not general aesthetics, which is generally permissible in philosophy).

The following definition is rather "leaky" in that it bars a couple things we now call art. Ikons and things such as Navajo sand painting, which is now considered art, but isn't intentionally created to be aesthetic communications. I am open to dialogue on this topic, which is why I am posting such a tentative work to the public. So any artist, poet, writer, or philosoph who wants to chime in, please feel free to do so.

Art is one of those terms that has proven itself to defy definition. In the real world, art is immediately obvious, we know it when we see it, but cannot define it, but to actually discuss it, we need an operation definition to separate art from not-art. Art is generally a skill, craft or practice (as evident from its latin origin “ars”) that aims for some aesthetic impact. This would place the more unconventional areas that we colloquially don’t think of as art into the same class as more classically regarded practices such as visual arts, music, and the textual arts. To narrow this down to fit the conventional usage of the term, we would need to include a more limiting clause, such as the popular post-modern category of “uselessness” (as discussed on my blog, previously), which limits art to aesthetics-for-the-sake-of-aesthetics, discarding unconventional fields such as industrial design and most cases of architecture.

This “utility clause” might be too limiting, since sometimes art is a medium for expression, such as protest or other public displays of issues of import to the artist. Intent might be a limiting factor, where art must exist as art, with the intent to be art. To make this more analytical, art must exist, by intention, for its own sake. This is, to be honest, a rather contrived definition. This would separate art from the non-intentionally aesthetic, such as works of architecture, whose aesthetics are intrinsic to their overt purpose, and not contained within their purpose itself.

The latin origin “ars” also can mean trickery or cunning, which can serve to highlight another aspect of the arts, it tries, through various stylistic manipulations, to trick the viewer (after creation) into seeing something in the artists head. This also is a display of intention, art can be seen, in this light, as a form of intentional aesthetic communication between two parties, that of the creator, and that of the spectator.
These definitions are imperfect, admittedly, the allow somethings to be called art which are not normally, and exempt some forms of expression that we do call art in daily life. Art, as stated, is impossible to define because of its social nature, the definition of what art is, and what art can be, changes with cultural circumstance. Definition is also problematic because of the inherent subjectivity contained within it, art is personal, and aesthetic judgement varies from individual to individual.

Prelude to Interactive Art: An Aesthetic Propopal

2006-09-09T18:46:00.000-07:00

0. Basis: As based on a debate over whether video games could be a valid medium of artistic expression, a major complaint against this hypothesis was the interactivity involved in the medium, which is lacking from the current media included as art.

This interactivity in mediums that we classically define as art is not non-existant, it is just concealed, or hidden, since the viewer ultimately creates the meaning as an observer. Classical forms of artistic expression exist, overtly, as objects to be observed, but the observer plays no implicit roll in the form or outcome of the peice. But this can be contrasted to video games as art in which the interactivity can be seen as the medium itself, the very structure of the work is defined as interactivity, where the observer becomes an overt participant.

Apparently art has become equated with "functionless-ness", where art is defined as passivity, and lack of purpose beside "being art". This can be seen in a statement attributed to the sculptor Richard Serra that "... the difference between art and architecture is that art is necessarily useless...", and a quote from the French post-modernist Jean Baurillard:

"Since a long time art pretends to be useless (it was not the case till the 19th century, where, in a world that was not yet objective nor real the question about useful- or uselessness was not even to be raised). It is therefore logical that it should have a predilection for trash and waste, which is also useless. To turn any object into a piece of art you just have to make it useless. What the ready-made achieves by taking away the function from the object, without changing it in any way (by the way, Duchamp was not so obsessed with the ready-made : he said "One ready-made from time to time, but not ten a day !")" [emphasis mine, from the essay "Integral reality"]

It seems that because current art falls into the "useless" camp (perhaps due to limitations in media) it has limited our scope into the idea that art is necessarily lacking in function or interactivity, mostly because it is a feature of art today. I dare say that this is a limited and very synthetic judgement on art, and misses some features and areas which we recognize as art, or at least historically have, namely architecture and engineering. In light of Baudrillard's caveat about the question of lack of utility being a recent interdiction into the definition of art, we can make sense of Serra's division, since he too is mired in the modern/post-modern paradigm of art. Classically, though, structures such as the Golden Gate bridge, or Notre Dame have been seen as aesthetic works, albeit for different reasons. This functional aesthetic can also be seen in modern industrial and software design as seen in David Gelernter's book "Machine Beauty: Elegance and the Heart of Technology", where Gelernter explicitly equates design (as aesthetics) with functionality, beauty is defined by simplicity, or congruity of form to purpose. This can be read into more mainstream forms of static art too, where the purpose of the object is to be art. It can be said, following this reasoning, that art is its own purpose.

Video games may well be what photography and cinema were to art in their inception. In both cases the aesthetic merits of the emergent mediums were denied possible aesthetic worth. Photography was merely "documentary", it was "taken" but not "created" like what was contemporaneously called valid forms of artistic expression . Cinema was merely a form of entertainment, and not seen as a valid medium for artistic expression. History has proven these views against the emergent mediums as false, both photography and cinema are valid forms of artistic expression today. Perhaps video games sits with these, but do to our proximity to the current status-quo of art, we are blind to their aesthetic potential.

But where does this leave interactivity? Does aesthetic worth automatically preclude overt interactivity in static art (art that is not designed for practical use)? Can the structure of a work of art (for arts sake) not allow interactivity, and would the introduction of interactivity into art destroy its "artness"?

This demands an experiment in allowing the very structure of a piece of art to become interactivity itself, like a video game. The media must be wholly dynamic, and open to others to actually create. The experiment is to create a classic work of art (in this case graphic) that captures the elements of video game interactivity that are lacking from the classic media. This is to show that interactivity CAN be, eventually, viewed as aesthetic, even if it is a relatively new potential, that there is nothing barring interactivity from being within art. The goal is to create interactivity as art, as well is in the art itself. Art where the role of spectator and artist vanish, where the classic wall between artist and observer can be allowed to disappear, allowing aesthetics to become pure interactivity.

1. The Model: In a conversation with Laura Schonberger about the above topic, we decided to find a way to remove the limited interactivity which is contained in modern art, specifically visual art, which is a dilemma since there is only so much interactivity allowed by traditional media such as paint and canvas. The opening model we developed involved some way of translating the "Choose Your Own Adventure" idea into art, which is problematic since conventional visual art is not temporally arranged, and thus potentially destroys the idea of choice, or decision on behalf of the spectator. Graphic art is necessarily static upon completion, the actual creative potential exits the picture, creating the problem of how to keep the dynamism of creation in the finished piece.

The answer to this problem is to remove the potential for completion from the creative act, and to open it up to outside involvement. If completion was allowed, the project would immediately revert to static art, and loose its essence of interactivity (much like the limited interactivity allowed by an exquisite corpse type project). Destroying the artist/spectator divide is much more difficult when the potential for completion is removed from the artistic process, and something novel is needed to meet this end. The art of the project needs to be infinitely open, and non-completeable, to maintain the goal of interactivity, which is daunting. Below is presented a potential solution towards these problems:

2. The Project:

Spectators will be giving 6"x6" pieces of paper (to conserve costs), as many as they want. And a choice of various media to apply to the paper. What they create is unconstrained by the organizers, it is wholly up to the public.

These completed squares of paper will be aligned into a grid of potentially infinite 6"x6" sections. The arrangement of these pieces are up to the spectators, and can be changed at whim by any person. There is no finished configuration of squares except as limited by time constraints of the event itself .

The organizers role in this event, beyond initial set up, is the same as that of the spectators, they are equal to them in every way, and have no privileged input. Beyond that they must make the intention of the project clear, to help with the tearing down of the classic divide between artist and observer. Perhaps some kind encouragement would be preferred.

The event should take place in a venue with high foot traffic, and artistic atmosphere, such as a First Friday, or Art Walk, or any communal display of galleries and such.

Ideally the project would take place in such a way to allow for permanence (as in no possible state of completion), and allow for potentially infinite space for arrangement. Sadly the real world will not allow for this. Transportation and reassembly is permissible, since it can maintain interactivity and requisite dynamism.

Note: this whole article is a collaboration with the aforementioned Laura Sconberger, who deserves as much credit as I in its creation.

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, art projects, interactivity, post-modernism, theory, videogames

Summa Mundi: A work in progress

2006-09-05T17:38:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the long absence from posting, I have been working on a summary of my various philosophical positions to date, which is a much more complicated undertaking than it seemed at first grasp. Being that work is chronically unfinished though, I will not post it here as of yet (I doubt any of you have a taste for 10 pages of unconnected, and unfinished notes), but this space definitely needs to be filled, or at least updated. Its sad how our projects demand our attention when we neglect them. I will try to summarize some of my findings from the last month's project though, borrowing heavily from the aforementioned notes.

The primary idea I'm developing right now is a tripartite view of the world as experience. The groundwork of what we experience as existence is based within these three interrelated stages, by this I mean they exist as the basis of our actions upon them, they both inform and structure our existence (as action). As of now these worlds are bordering on pure ad hoc, they are place holders to help place the other ideas within a defining context. These worlds exist as a weakened version of what Nelson Goodman presented in "Ways of Worldmaking"

The first of these worlds is what I term the External, as in it is the world that exists prior to experience. It is the basis (or bedrock) for all experience, and all subsequent worlds of experience. This is world that most people mean when they use the term. Some of the features of this world are:

It is not subject to privileged experience (it is not "Given").
It is only knowable as surface phenomena
It exists as a series of external facts, or data points.
Connections between events exist as interpretations via several possible contexts.
Each external event has a penumbra of meaning, which is shaped by context.
Experience of this world can be said to be infinitely recursive.
There are various scales, each with explanatory power.

The general (and informal) gist of these features is that definitions of events in the External recede, and are fuzzy, with no end certainty of definite knowledge possible, each feature implies another, ad infinitum. All knowledge from this world is based upon the connection of events attributed within it, and is thus further abstracted from this world it-self (it is a Kantian thing-in-itself).

The second, and more immediate world is the Internal world that we inhabit from day to day. While not completely objective, this world is more real than any other world, in that this is the world in which we exist in, and base our understanding of other levels of reality from. This world is informed by the External, as well as by the Social worlds, and by other individuals. Some features of this world are:

It is largely phenomenological in.
This world is informed by the external world.
It consists of all of our perceptual apparatus, and subjective experience, and that we take to be given.
This world provides the primary structure for understanding and knowledge.

This world can be seen (and grossly simplified) as an interpretation layer to existence, it lends meaning and context to the data from the External (and observations of Self, etc...), in this it can be said the the basis of the Internal world is mainly hermeneutic (rather than, say, epistemological).

The third world is the Social, or Communal world. This world is the communal synthesis of the collection of individual worlds, and can be seen as the interpretation layer of these. This world serves to synthesize and re-normalize experience and knowledge from the Individual with that of the group. There is no single Social world, nor can it be reduced to any fixed number. Each group can be said to be a portion of the social world, in that all groups interface in same way or not. This world might be analogous to the modern concept of a network. This world informs and is informed by the Individual, and serves to create the bounds of the individual, and defines the range of possible knowledge and action. It, perhaps, also in-part creates the individual, himself by function of Foucaultian Power.

The Social is also the realm in which more advanced forms of human knowledge happens, such as science and philosophy. This is where the (anti)epistemology of Rorty also comes to play, with knowledge being largely social, and also the scientific paradigms of Kuhn (and the epistemes of Foucault). This world also functions to define the relationship between the Individual and External. Of the three worlds, the Social is the one that I have spent less work on, so please forgive the vagueness (more so than the previous two, that is).

Another thing I am trying to rectify with the above is a general theory of aesthetics, which right now is very vague, and mostly springs from a conversation (via email) with David Titterington (prompted by this blog post). I really can't update the status of aesthetics yet, since it is right now a sketch of a theory, and lacks much coherence. It does seem to be a function of time, and is a valid way of knowing and expressing the world. I'm leaning towards the idea that art (as poetry, music, and visual) is as good a method of representation as science, and isn't seen as such only as a function of anglophone society, and its emphasis on knowledge (as hypothetico-deductive-method, and logical reduction), and not because of any weakness of art. That said, art makes bad science, and science bad art, they are not exchangeable, but both highlight aspects of existence in different lights and contexts. Art can be seen as context free abstraction. The realms of ethics is as yet untouched.

The end result of this philosophy can be summed up in this overly pompous and poetic statement: "We are the architects of the world".

I'm sorry for the rough feel of this post, as I warned at the beginning, this is very much a work in progress, and I only submit it here for comment, and not to present any grand point, or illumination.

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