THE FIRST WEEK OFF
00-3-20

Apparently I have so much to say that I need a TOC for this update:

• Introductory comments, which do not have any sort of title (except this).
• On getting what you ask for, part one (innovation).
• On getting what you ask for, part two (artistry).
• On getting what you ask for, part three (genius).
• One of the conversations on the philosophy of mind had to do with zombies.
• Morphic resonance in action.
• Some things I sincerely hope I will have time to do.
• Speaking of compelling experiences: I think I spend most of my money on the pursuit of them.

I'm suffering from some sort of hypercognition. There are so many things I want to do & so many possibilities. Sometimes this stresses me out instead of making me happy for being so improbably lucky. Busy is good. Sorry.

Canadians: our money is getting funkier. I hope this keeps up. (As an aside, can anyone remember what was on the back of the old five and twenty dollar bills? The one had logging, the two had fishing (or maybe it was the other way around) and the ten had a power plant. Anyone remember? Tell me: stewart@sylloge.com.)

Update (00-03-22): Lawrence Lee, editor of one of the most useful sites on the web, Tomalak's Realm, writes in with (as would be expected) some very useful links:

Bank of Canada site, they have a great collection with scans of the front and back of all the bank notes issued since 1935.

Here's a shortcut to the 1969-1979 series

* * *

I stop thinking about personalization and XML and ebusiness and conversion rates and CPMs and profiling engines and customer acquisition cost and content management systems and dilution and navigation structure and help files and flow diagrams and blah blah blah IPO IPO IPO for just a little while, and all these other interesting things come back to me...

On getting what you ask for, part one (innovation):

So, I was at the UPA conference last summer and I saw Larry Keeley from the Doblin Group give a great talk on compelling experiences (find out more about it). As an intro, he talked about shifts for designers, which included an excellent set of slides showing a set of seemingly random tools and technologies, then overlayed with occupations clustered around the tools, then showing groupings: information design in one corner, as a subset of interaction design, as a subset of work on transaction systems, as a subset of work on experience systems (and a place for academics up in the opposite corner). I've been thinking about this for months now.

The thing is, I'm some schmoe who was sick of having to draw these slides on the backs of napkins from memory. But I write them an email, asking if they happened to have the slides I remembered and could they please send copies to me? A few emails back and forth, and I had the .ppt file. Now, this is an "innovation consultancy", and they have Motorola, Monsanto, and McDonald's as clients (just the "M"s). Their minimum engagement is probably $500K or higher. And they are willing to share their ideas. For free. With people they don't know. That is very cool.

On getting what you ask for, part two (artistry):

And I notice from reading Alamut that Paul Perry is visiting Vancouver. I figure, here is an interesting person. He is talking about Vancouver and coffee, so I offer to buy him a coffee, here, in Vancouver. And he said yes. Once again the magical power of the internet makes a connection between people who never would have met.

It turned out to be a fantastic conversation, and I enjoyed it (in the truest Csikszentmihalyian sense). I probably almost certainly wouldn't have done that if I was working. But I'll have to work again some day. Hopefully I'll still be able to do things like that. Cheers, Paul.

On getting what you ask for, part three (genius):

Stephen Toulmin is one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century. In 1979 he gave the Ryerson lecture at the University of Chicago. It was called The Inwardness of Mental Life. The University published a monograph of the lecture (under the same title). When I was a grad student, I found a copy of it (there were only a few printed). I photocopied it, but that was years ago.

The lecture is an excellent exposition on the various notions which swirl together when we normally think or talk about mental life as being inward. The identification (reasonable or not) of mental events with specific biological or neurochemical goings-on occurring inside of us may contribute to us thinking that the mental events are going on inside of us as well. But just because we are able to internalize and keep private certain activities which we learned in a public context (like talking, reading, doing arithmetic) it doesn't mean that these activities are essentially or fundamentally private.

Rather, I've come to think that consciousness (at least the particular variety of consciousness enjoyed by humans) is essentially a shared, public (intersubjective) phenomenon. We can keep our thoughts and experiences private, but when we do that, we are doing the same thing as when we keep a secret of any kind.

I doubt anyone who wasn't already inclined to agree on this point would be convinced by my stating my opinion, but this isn't really the proper forum for long-winded exegesis. Instead, consider this (aha! distraction!):

... neither language nor thinking can be fully explained in terms of the other, and neither has conceptual priority. The two are, indeed, linked, in the sense that each requires the other in order to be understood; but the linkage is not so complete that either suffices, even when reasonably reinforced, to explicate the other. (p156. Donald Davidson, 1984: "Thought and Talk" in Truth and Interpretation. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.)

The Inwardness of Mental Life also introduced me to Tristram Shandy, which I have been reading pretty much at the same rate it was originally published. (In other words, it's taken years and I'm still not finished, but I like to pretend that I'm so slow because I'm trying to have the authentic Tristram Shandy experience.)

Anyway, the lecture came to mind after a few conversations on the topic of consciousness I've had lately and I wanted to refer the article to someone. But a few hours of searching on the web and via telnet to local library catalogs, I couldn't even find a reference to it, let alone finding a copy online. So I invested the hour to dig it up out of my, um, archives (a large overstuffed cardboard box which holds most of the papers I found worthy of retaining, 1992-1998). But after I finally found it, I thought "it'd be a shame if this paper only existed in a few hundred places in the world, basically inaccessible to those who are not currently affiliated with a large research universities."

So I found Toulmin's email address and asked him if he'd mind if I petitioned uchicago.edu to let me publish the text of the lecture online (it appears that they hold the copyright). It is valuable work, a great read and I'd like more people to be able to get at it. And to finish the trilogy, he immediately said yes as well. Once I get the necessary permission and find a painless way to get the text into digital format, I'll post the link.

So there you go. Three for three. Amazing what happens when you ask.

One of the conversations on the philosophy of mind had to do with zombies:

Zombies, in the parlance of contemporary cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind, are beings which seem just like human beings in every respect, but who have no conscious experience, phenomenological inner life, qualia or whatever you want to call it.

There was a great debate between Daniel Dennett (one of my early academic heros, and one of the reason I studied philosophy) and David Chalmers (Chalmers rose to prominence just as my attention drifted away from the study of consciousness and as a result I have never read any of his books). Chalmers maintained that subjective experience or the what-it-is-like-to-be of a person is not amenable to scientific (or any sort of) explanation in principle. We could explain every aspect of cognition and still not explain consciousness. Dennett disagrees, of course (he wrote the book Consciousness Explained).

Read Chalmers' essay on the "Hard Problem" of consciousness and Dennett's response and then Chalmers' response to his critics (with links to many of the other commentators on the original essay). There was also a book written about the whole affair.

I'm on Dennett's side. I also think that people who believe they can imagine zombies are in much the same position as people who believe they can imagine 13 not being a prime number.

Morphic resonance in action:

Here is one for Rupert Sheldrake (see also his profile in Salon):

Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2000 23:34:54 +0100
From: zdeno hlinka <zden@message.sk>
X-Accept-Language: en
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: 5k@sylloge.com
Subject: <web4096>

Hi guys,

i am an organizer of <web4096> - 4096 bytes long .net art webs.
We are running this competition from december 00.
Now we are in voting phase. Submits are great!
http://message.sk/web4096

--
zden - satori - http://message.sk/zden

A 4K contest. I swear I came up with the idea for the 5k last summer (and I did have a page explaining the idea on Sylloge as far back as November), but I doubt they got the idea from me. Many people have written to me telling me about one-line BASIC programming contests -- I guess varieties of this meme are already part of the collective unconsciousness. Anyway, check out some of the entries in the <web4096>. Some of them are pretty damn good.

Some things I sincerely hope I will have time to do:

1. Joe Clark should have a job at a place which pays an enormous salary and offers a lucrative options package. I said I was going to make a "Give my friend Joe Clark a job!" page, but I haven't done it yet. I would hire him. I recommended hiring him at the last place I worked. If I had an ecommerce site and I wanted to turn good content into a competitive advantage, Joe would be the guy I'd want spearheading the operation. Get him working for you.
   
   
2. I registered practicalstunts.com and practicalstunts.org, because about a week ago I tried to remember the phrase "practical joke", and "practical stunt" came to mind instead. Then I thought: arranging funding for some brilliant practical stunts would be a great thing to do.
   
   What is a practical stunt? It must be funny and it must leave the world a better place (think of culture jamming, but more constructive). The 5k is a practical stunt, of sorts. Here is an example: start an international advertising campaign (including full-page ads in the New York Times) educating people about the correct usage of the words "irony" and "ambivalent". (And letting them know that "impact" and "access" are not verbs, damnit!).

Speaking of compelling experiences: I think I spend most of my money on the pursuit of them:

Here are the things I have bought in the last week:

• A lifetime subscription to McSweeney's.
• Two copies of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (one as a gift).
• Many delicious meals in various restaurants; for the gourmand in me, and often for the prospect of interesting conversation.
• About seven bucks worth of coffee every day (see above).
• New issue of The Sciences.
• New issue of Wired (first time in about a year).
• Movie tickets (What Planet are You From? Ended up walking out.)
• Theatre tickets (Twelfth Night -- you were great Jess.)
• Museum tickets (Neon City at the Vancouver Museum) -- not done yet.

Tomorrow is my birthday.