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  [From the forgot to publish when posted department.]
Ontology recapitulates philology. (I love that.) Willard Van Orman Quine, Died on Christmas at the ripe old age of 92. I believe he was still teaching (still faculty anyway) right up until a year or two ago.

It made me think of that moment when I switched, as an undergrad, from neuropsych to philosophy, got into the philosophy of language course after a long and convincing argument with the professor and got my copy of Word and Object. Wow! Philosophy of language! Cool! (Starts reading ...) Wow, this is boring. (... keep reading ...) I can't belive how boring this is. And so on.

I couldn't even understand what he's saying because it was so boring. But then, gradually, like strong cheese, the analytic flavour grew on me. Soon enough I was seeking out unpasteurized goat's Lewis and sharp Davidson cheddar. And so much flowed from Quine.

He was, to some, the most important philosopher of the 20th century. That was a funny century. Heh.

  Near Death Syndrome: Mappa.Mundi Magazine




Friday, December 29

  The most addictive game in years. I love a well-designed game. Do not follow this link if you have something you have to do. (Shockwave.)

  In answering one of my questions: Greg points me to Baudrillard in Cyberspace: Internet, Virtuality, and Postmodernity to which my attitude is "oh yeah, we'll see about that".

The esteemed Jill Walker of Universitetet i Bergen points out that Van Dam used "navigational" in 1985, here, and finds a section in Engelbart's Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework that I must have missed and suggests the ht_lit mailing list as a place where one might find accurate answers to those sorts of questions.

Also, I have been practicing Mauro Giuliani's opus 107, Variazioni or Variations on the theme of G.F. Händel, AKA, "The Harmonious Blacksmith".

Also, I thought I made long posts.




Friday, December 22

  Closed temporarily. I'm leaving now to ski a little mountain I've never been to before. Had the best christmas party ever. Happy Merridays.

  I have an mp3 for you, which I am liking very much. It is Beck and Emmylou Harris doing the Hillman/Parsons tune Sin City.

Think of it like a christmas present. I hate christmas shopping so I don't do it anymore. (It's nice to invoke my nominal judaism at points like this.) People get presents whenever I think of a good present for that person. For all of you who read this though, you get to have supported my local United Way and also get this nice mp3:

I couldn't find a good link for Hillman and Parsons, but when I was looking I found the lyrics to a song of theirs called My Uncle which contains the following lines:

So I'm headed for the nearest foreign border
Vancouver may be my kind of town
Cause they don't need the kind of law and order
That tends to keep a good man underground

  I remember that note: vivez sans temps mort.

Let us be excommunicated. Lisa's new Urban PRoject9 (find link and explanation/disclaimer from above) is wonderful for two reasons: it contains wonders and it gives non-Vancouverites such a visceral taste (mixed, to be sure) of what it is like being here.

I like to find notes and signs too.

  A thought about a thought about intuition. The winnowing-down of huge possibility spaces is surely the great topic of this new century. I see it everywhere (though probably mostly only in a way that I'll find retroactively chimeral). But most of the problems that we have collectively deemed worthy of serious investment, investigation and attention (genomics & proteinomics, micromechanics, economics, neuroscience, massive networks, information preservation and moving-about) seem to hang on problems involving numbingly huge possibility spaces.

Chess has traditionally been a favorite analogy of mine because the distinction between the constraints that the computer has to work with (e.g., the initial position of the pieces, the rules of movement and engagement, etc.) are so obviously of a different order than the sort that a competent chess player works with (try to control the center, keep your pieces dynamic, "a knight on the rim is dim", etc.) The resulting possibility space for legal chess games (the set, as it were, of well-formed chess games) is huge, and that's what the computer has to plod through. (I understand that chess programmers have heuristic techniques but it is still mostly brute force.) [Bonus question: does anyone know if there are an infinite number of chess games? If not, what the limit is?]

But some of these games just aren't sensible (imagine one where you move all your pawns out, one square each, from right to left, while I do the opposite and then you move each pawn one position forward again, from left to right, while I do the same ...) There is the set of all possible chess games according (solely) to the rules of chess, and then there is the much smaller set of chess games which ... what? Which it would be reasonable for two people to play? Which are "realistic"? Which is the set determined by the both the rules and the aesthetic of chess? or the ethos of chess? Something. Whatever higher-order constraints apply to plausible-seeming moves are what enables us to play chess in a way that makes sense.

The same exact thing is true, for instance, of a CD. Every compact disc is (among other things) a sequence of 1s and 0s. Thus it is also a binary number; anything less than somewhere around 2 ^{681 574 400} by the back of my envelope. This gives us the (incomprehensibly large) number of possible CDs. But, of course, there are other constraints: for it really to count as a CD, it has to be readable, so there a few standardized features which need to be manifest as substrings in the long sequence of 1s and 0s that is the number of this CD. This probably implies a minimum length and precludes all those numbers which do not contain the appropriate substrings. If we restrict our considerations to audio CDs (or any other particular application) then more swaths of numbers are made illegitimate because they do not conform to the "format" (.cda)

It gets more interesting when we think about what would really count as a CD to a normal human being. Most "possible" CDs would be white noise and so don't count. Many more would be not quite noise, but not intelligible to anyone either, just garbage. On the other hand, some will be contemporary country (like it or not, this counts). Some will be gamelan, some gospel, some glockenspiel, etc. The majority would presumably be borderline: maybe tuneful gibberish, Shakespeare set to ragtime but in a bad way, whatever. No matter how grey or large the grey area is, there are some numbers that are plainly "CDs" while some others plainly are not. Finally, in the bewildering variety of the remaining possible CDs (still, mind you, a much-larger superset of all those CDs that will ever get produced till the end of time) there are the ones that are good. Think of good albums. If we could identify the constraints at work in our selection here, we'd have the complete analysis of the musically beautiful. (Prediction: unlikely)

The most interesting thing in the world —just because it is what makes all these other things interesting, like chess and music— is the restriction of what is possible to what makes sense. (Usually understandable as a succession of constraint-groups, each concentrically exerting their affect, each one more sophisticated and important than the last.) I wish I had a better way of saying that. The exclusion of those things which are merely possible from the set of "potential" or "plausible" things? No matter how you I say it, it doesn't sound right. "The way order shrinks possibility spaces." Anyway, very interesting.

Stuart Kauffman's stuff (I have started Investigations but haven't got far enough to report anything) has always seemed to provide the key insight: a reasoning-out of how dumb random (inter-)connections among parts of systems constrain the wanderings of those systems which the parts compose. The constraints, and thus the order, comes, as he says, "for free". Hook up a bunch of things which effect each other into a network and you've got automatic constraints. Our nervous system is just such a system. Our particular cognitive ability of low search costs for big possibility spaces (as in the chess game or the identification of legitimate CDs) may be inexplicable not because of its profundity but because of its mundanity (resulting from its lack of structure). It could be a generic property of the class of complex systems of which our nervous systems are an instance. It could be explained just by generic anatomical features (e.g., long axons and lotsa dendrites over here).

And why not? There are certainly no specific synapse-by-synapse instructions anywhere for how the billions of sets of neurons hook up to each other. At a fine enough level of granularity, it is random (though macroscopically structured: everyone (nearly) has an amygdala, a cerrebellum, a central sulcus, and so on). But the random hookups (and densities, gross positions, type distributions and other statistical properties of these random hookups) are what ultimately drive the nervous system. Our ability to resolve and distill the space of possible chess games is on this view a result of a bunch of random stuff (random, at least, in any respect which would be relevant for explaining good chess games, good albums, stinky smells).

The identification of the constraints (above) which would reveal the secret structure of music turns out to be just the identification an assortment of in-themselves meaningless cellular growths. "We think like that because our brain is like this." It would, in some respects, be a lame end for neuroscience, but I can certainly imagine it ending before it really does any explaining of those things which matter when the science is over. (Remember how unsatisfying stuff like this is: "It smells bad because there is sulfur in it.")

Now I'm tired and I forgot what I was going to say in the first place.




Thursday, December 21

  Well, this is a life, isn't it? Yes, this is a life.

  Here's a Multi-screen Narrative from Ftrain that I read in a internet cafe in the west village a week and a half ago: Why are Human Beings So Terrible?




Tuesday, December 19

  Since Alice (nice new splash page) didn't tell this story, I'll steal it.

So, we're in Starbucks and they have these two guys "working" there who (in my made up story of their lives) just got out of jail and were in some kind of federal back-to-work program. I had experienced their service the day before, but it was new to Alice who ordered a Latte and got back a deadpan "$11.34 please." She remarked that that seemed to be rather higher than the posted price and the confusion was subsequently worked out.

The funny part was the proof, which followed behind her in the queue, that no matter how stupid the server, there is a dumber customer out there:

"I'll have a tall grande please."
[Nonplussed.] Uh, tall is, like, our medium and grande is, like, our large.
[With a nod, as if his order was just confirmed.] "That's right."

We didn't stick around to see what actually got served.




Monday, December 18

  You're the top
You're the top, you're Mahatma Gandhi,
You're the top! you're Napoleon brandy,
You're the purple light, of a summer night in Spain,
You're the National Gallery, you're Garbo's salary,
You're cellophane!
(via Judith)

  Help! HELP! Can you help me find the earliest use of the term "navigation" to with reference to hypertext, interfaces, or the act of information retrieval, particularly as it might be considered a precursor to today's ubiquitous usage? (Google Search: navigation history hypertext). So far the winner is Andries van Dam's from keynote address from Hypertext '87, but I am sure there are earlier ones than that ...

ohlookIfoundsomething_hopeithelps_haveagreatday@sylloge.com

  Dislocation, negotiations of power, the recuperative potential of narrative: blackbough.com (which is not pronounced "black-bow", but "black-bow" (where the former sounds like an archer's bow and the latter sounds like the bow of a ship). Silence broken.

  I got an email a while ago saying that Sylloge was one of the sites behind a day at Christmas Magazine's Advent calendar but it hasn't happened yet. C'mon advent, daddy needs a new pair of Jesuses.




Sunday, December 17

  The more I think, the less I know.

I am compelled to rationality, my only self-springing discipline or habit of character: while the papers are inches-deep on the living room floor, dishes and pots stacked haphazardly in and around the sink, all my schemes and projects having their signals lost in each other's interference, I still go over the same decision as if it is a rubik's cube that I am inspecting for things I missed the first time, and as if I know how to solve this rubik's cube analogue, which I don't. It doesn't go anywhere (zoom), compulsive thought, but it appears prudent, well-advised, even necessary. Each iteration is a regessive step to a more encompassing view, taking more "into account", seeing a little farther but also being a little farther away.

But soon, my spade will have been turned, I'll brace my foot on the bedrock and have that inclination

to say, 'This is simply what I do.'

It is good to be home.

Wednesday, December 6

  Shhh ... www.the5k.org.

Eric Costello rules.




Saturday, December 2

  Some highlights of my trip:

• Going clubbing in London with bona fide members of the London-Brighton lesbian clubbing cabal. I was an insider, inside my group of girls, and for every "Izzis gentalmen wif you?" there was a corresponding "Oh yeah, he's fine." I even have pictures of the inside of a club, with dancing.
• The little silver trays with a glass of water with every coffee drink in Vienna (now I know where Subeez got it from).
• The contrast between Rotterdam and Amsterdam, and my excellent host.
• Psychotropically enhanced superconversations in coffeeshops, mostly with Ben Cerveny (who doesn't have a website, but if he did, it would be full of clever things) and that one time with the biophysicist, ol' Martin K.
• Coming onstage with barefeet and smoking a joint at the start of my second presentation, which was the first thing on Sunday morning when I felt like shit with only two hours sleep. And the joke was funny, except the timing wasn't quite right, and only about a 1/3 of the audience was there for the first few sessions.
• Inane argument with Natalie Jeremijenko on Jouke's panel.
• Hanging out in the speaker's room with big famous people like Brian Eno and Bruce Sterling, like I was some big famous person too.
• Being generally overwhelmed with all the people I met and the cigarettes and lunches and sittings-down with coffee and the little sandwiches and shaking hands and pleeztumeetchus.
• Working on the fly, at the last possible minute, all through the lunch break before my last presentation and having it work out. Having performed, at least adequately, for 1300 people.
• The German conductor coming to tell me that I only had a reservation and not a ticket and would I now please purchase a ticket? OK, but I thought this was both a reservation and a ticket. No, the price is DM220. The next conductor will join at Salzburg and you will buy another ticket then. But of course, it was both a reservation and a ticket, as the next conductor confirmed. But the next conductor couldn't do anything; he was Austrian.
• Supper at the Supper Club (official site) which frankly was a little irritating since I actually wanted to talk to my companions and it took four hours to sup. Too much ambience is no longer ambient.
• One social 24-hour period in London which included dinner with and then lounging at the home of Jamie King (with Paul) and then a string of meetings with the likes of Matt Webb, Matt Jones and Kenneth Cukier.

  In the mail last Friday was issue No. 5 of McSweeney's. I got the simple red dustjacket with the mirror-reversed text cover. Then, at Derek Sisson's urging, bought a copy of Philosophy in the Flesh — actually walking to a physical bookstore to get it — and, while there, also noticed a new issue of The Sciences (which seems to have gone down hill in the last few years).

I am very skeptical about Lakoff's new book, which starts off thusly:

   The mind is inherently embodied.
   Thought is mostly unconscious.
   Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.
   These are three major findings of cognitive science. More than two millennia of a priori philosophical speculation about these aspects of reason are over. Because of these discoveries, philosophy can never be the same again.

I promise to read a little more of the book before I rip in, but that is not a auspicious beginning. Never mind the hubris ("if I have seen further, it was with no help from these feeble minds which preceeded me") but the first one is just not news (Origin of Species was published in 1859, Descent of Man in 1871 — if Lakoff's book came out in 1850, I bet it would have turned some heads, but has been at least 50 years since there was anyone for whom that would really be a controversial position. Oldstyle dualists are about as common now as educated people who literally believe in a Christian God.)

I suppose it might be deliberate, some kind of word-trick that he's saving up for later, but why use "mind" at all then? I mean, why try to say that what we've conventionally understand as non-physical, is really, after all, physical? Why not just say, "see those animals that we call 'humans'? They are just animals." Maybe it's because it's so hard for me to see an alternative to naturalism that I don't get the punch here.

An Amazon user review reads, in part:

If you are a member of the anti-science tribe of philosophers of mind and language, you will have been trained to ignore the arguments and scientific data that are presented by Lakoff and Johnson.

Eh? The "anti-science tribe of philosophers of mind and language"? Where do you find them? Anglo-american philosophers of mind and language are overwhelmingly science-worshipping, sometimes to the point of folly. Way to cut down an army of straw men ...

But it just might be great. We'll see.

  Science, Mathematics, and Beauty (and simplicity too).

  When I got home, I had notices for two parcels at the post office. The first was Kauffman's Investigations, which I had ordered from a coffeeshop while 5,000 miles from home. The other was a manuscript copy of Alexander's The Nature of Order, lent by a planner friend.

The version I was lent dates back from 1994, and is two volumes, together the size of a pretty serious phone book. Cursory inspection reveals that the first section is a superset of my thesis topic, and the ideas on the whole look a lot like Alfred North Whitehead's vision of wholeness (as Alexander points out in a footnote). I read Science and the Modern World and started Process and Reality once, and let me tell you, the idea of Whitehead through the pen of an architect is more obscure and obtuse and maddening as anything can imagine. I swear to Christ that Process and Reality is the hardest to understand non-full-of-shit book in the entire world. I guess what I'm saying is that the Nature of Order, being as it is centered on the most interesting topic there is, is either going to aggravate me to no end or provoke raptures hitherto unknown.

My copy of Science and the Modern World is nothing like the fresh reprints; it is 1948 paperback, with a glossy cover of vivid colours and 35¢ smacked in the upper right corner. The crackly khaki pages contained delightful easy to read history, passsages explaining his philosophy which I couldn't understand no matter how hard I reread them, and passages which caused tightly closed eyes and a spinal reflex of pleasure when I recognized my own dreams about an enriched monadology, when I thought I glimpsed the most sublime understanding of all, how each [whatever] reflects the rest of the universe in itself, being constituted by its relations to the rest, of generation and corruption and the becoming of all things.

When I went to find that book, to find a quote (couldn't find it), I noticed all the other grand books I own, read and unread, on the topics, variously, of order, wholeness, organism, organisation, life, relations without properties, interconnection, form, structure, morphology, systems. I made a stack of books I really really want to read, but haven't in the four, five, six years I've owned them: Bohm's Wholeness and the Implicate Order (digression: really bizarre epinion on that book), some Whitehead and meta-Whitehead stuff, Martha Nussbaum's translation, comments and essays on Aristotle's De Motu Animalium. Stack up, stack down.

I used to dream that there was an understanding to be had, and that I could at some point acheive that understanding. Maybe I gave up too soon, but in the last years I have come to believe that there is no golden epiphany, no intellectual El Dorado. That it is a chimera, unobtainable, and it's best to join the "real" worlds, the worlds of commerce and society, to make something of myself, be productive, contribute; I have come to believe that merely trying to understand how all insights could be refractions of the same glowing source is not a worthwhile activity, since all those insights are contingent cultural constructions, products of our bodies and our times, and there just couldn't be enlightenment. Lately, however, it's occured to me that it may not therefore be useless to wander around systematic philosophy — it can have a purpose without an end. Then, again, I think of the pile of books on the coffee table and wonder how I'd feel if I made it higher.

By the way, here's a link to some 1937 lecture notes from Whitehead's Cosmologies Ancient and Modern course at Harvard, titled 'Whitehead on Time and Endurance'.

  The cover story from this weeks Georgia Straight, Crack into Hell chronicles a chance meeting between a latetwentysomething and a former girlfriend of his, who he hadn't seen for about a decade. They run into each other at Hastings & Main (probably the worst intersection in the world if intravenous drug use, HIV infection, street prostitution and crack are bad things). In the intervening time, she has become a crackhead and not-really-recovering heroin addict. Rememberance, consternation and events unfamiliar to him ensure. Good story.

Anyway, it reminded me of this incident on the tube last week. An older Japanese couple, perhaps mid-60s, snappily dressed with matching salt and pepper hair is a few meters ahead of me walking into the station. Near the bottom of the escalator I overtake them and I think how nice they look together with their parallel stockiness and high quality accessories. But then they get slightly out of sync, the man slightly faster; now they're too far apart. And she goes straight, he turns right, with me, heading for different lines. They don't acknowledge their separation and they don't say goodbye, it dawns on me, because they don't know each other.

I probably raised my brow and shook my head ever so slightly. I look at people all the time in public places, subways, streets, stores and I evaulate them, and think about the interactions we would have, if we had any interactions. But we don't, and all that potential is wasted, diffused into the hubba-bustle of the crowd. Huge worlds of possibilities are lopped off, small ones pruned away, and elsewhere, so fast I can't see, the branching paths through this world's space open up before me, bifurcating incomprehensibly; because I am related and I know all these people and have all these conversations going. Here I am, and here we all go.




Friday, December 1

  A Loving Spoonful is the kind of organization you should give money to. (Or, go to the Elbow Room for breakfast, don't finish your meal, and you'll be forced to donate.) Not that research doesn't need funding, but the incentive for pharmaceutical companies to work on HIV/AIDS therapies is already huge. People living with HIV/AIDS have all kinds of non-medical needs as well; food is one of them.

Here are some of the other things on this site:

The 5k contest
This year's contest is now open for entries. Help collectively correct for my laziness by telling everyone you know.

Stephen Toulmin's 1979 Ryerson Lecture at the University of Chicago, The Inwardness of Mental Life, reprinted with the kind permission of the Author & the University.

An excerpt from an interview with philosopher Donald Davidson, which I find complements the former.

A motion study where you can see all the frames of an animation at once, but also still see the animation.

Some pictures of my friend Paul spinning around in some art, which is really a machine.

Some pictures of Illuminares, Vancouver's annual latern festival.

Some pictures of The Symphony of Fire, Vancouver's annual fireworks competition.

A video from my second trip to Vegas in the year 2000. Sad, that.

And more, to be dusted off.